and google expands

Mmm, okay, so Google just grew bigger, and has acquired Picasa, which is apparently an image-viewing tool. This is probably a move on Google's part toward the desktop environment in order to compete with Microsoft and its impending (read: never released) Longhorn.

But then, Picasa also has something called Hello, which is apparently a sort of image-sharing client for easy and secure transfer of image files with your "buddies". And, among the possible buddies is what's called the BloggerBot, which, once sent an image file, "posts" the image to your blog.

It's kind of a weird, bizarre and unnecessarily convoluted way to support image hosting on Blogger. But it gets worse -- it's poorly documented and just not a great idea overall. For one thing, you have NO control over WHERE you want to save the file on the server; it just stuffs it at some random location. And if you want some text next to the picture, then bummer -- first you have to PUBLISH the picture, with just itself and a short caption, and then come and EDIT the post as I'm doing now. Not to mention, of course, the simple fact that to upload a picture, you have to launch this bizarre image-sharing chat client that is flashy but counter-intuitive to navigate. AND, the WORST, of course, is that, in the middle of creating a post, if you want to insert an image, you CANNOT do so from within Blogger! You have to launch Hello, publish the image into a SEPARATE post, get the URL from that post, delete that post, and paste the URL into the blog entry you're creating. Maybe I'm missing something, but this is completely ludicrous. And even if I AM missing something, if even I haven't figured it out yet in the past ten minutes of playing with this, then forget about the newbies -- whom this product clearly target.

Google google google. You should've done a lot more testing before unleashing this ugly beast. My guess is it's only a matter of time now before they allow more control over image management. But Blogger is not popular enough, and image-hosting not crucial enough, for Google to pull a Microsoft and try to pork-barrel bad programs (Hello) with needed features (image hosting).

Yes, I just accused Google of pulling a Microsoft. Be warned, Google. Eyes are watching your every move. I still love you, but you'll never be the same again. Especially after Jerome.