Street View and the Patriot Act

To anyone who is of the belief that Google Street View is "the Patriot Act in action", please go educate yourself before opening your mouth and sounding ridiculous. Google just added a ton of new locations, so I'm sure there will be more of an uprise by silly people than ever in the next few days. But before you speak and cause me to bang my head against my desk, please consider the following:

• Google is a corporation, not a government agency.
• Street View is not live, so please quit looking for the camera right outside your house. It already drove by 6 months ago.
• Google only travels on public property that any bozo can take pictures of (and when they accidentally stumble onto private property, they get in trouble for it and take it down)
• Google has technology that automatically blurs out faces and license plate numbers, so no, your wife can't tell that it was you leaving the strip club in the middle of the day. You might want to throw away that shirt though, just to be safe. If you're still worried about it, you can always hit the "Report a concern" link at the bottom of the image. It might also be a good idea to stop frequenting strip clubs in the middle of the day, pervert.

It's About Time!

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/12/holiday-goodies-from-picasa-web-albums_14.html

Holy cow, Google added a search function to their web albums. Yeah that's right. Added a search function!! My question is, how in the heck did they go so long without it?!? I believe it's been nearly a year since web albums came into existence and they came out of beta a couple of months ago...all without a search function. Even their own "new features" page touts the new search capability with the comment of "Hey, we're Google." EXACTLY! All the more reason search should've been the first thing you thought about. Sure it's a free service, but so is flickr and they've had search and tagging since their conception (as far as I know). Plus I'm pretty sure Flickr allows more than 250 mb of storage for their basic service. C'mon Google, if you can have an increasing mailbox size for all Gmail users (nearing 3 gbs) I know you can afford to stretch out the picasa limit a bit. I don't need 3 gb (yet), but 1 would certainly seem reasonable.

By the way, a good portion of my photos from this year can be on the aforementioned Picasa web albums at http://picasaweb.google.com/brianpsmith81. Feel free to try the search function out :-) Or order prints (another "new feature"). Don't expect to see many from next year though (unless Google finds a little more generosity)... my capacity has nearly been reached.