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Filed under: Web services, Google, Commercial

Google announces big price cuts on paid extra storage for GMail, Picasa Web

You may not have heard about it before, but Google has been offering additional storage for GMail and Picasa Web users for quite some time. Today, the folks in Mountain View announced big time price breaks.

If you want a little extra elbow room for your email, attachments, and shared photos plans now start at a whopping 20 gigabytes for only $5 per year. Not enough, you say? You'll be happy to know that Google offers up to a full terabyte for $256 annually. Granted, right now you can only use this space for GMail and Picasa Web stuff.

I think I'll be passing on that 16 TB option Sebastian screencapped for now, thanks.

At any rate, Chrome OS in on the way and that likely means we'll finally get our hands on the elusive GDrive as well. Here's hoping it does, anyway.

In the event that Google does open things up, how do their plans stack up against other popular offerings? Let's look at DropBox. For 50Gb of storage, you'll spend $10 per month. With Google's new plans, $20 will get you 80Gb - for the entire year. That's not too shabby.

Sure would be nice if we could use it for all-purpose storage. You listening, Google?

Who's with me?

Google adds web albums to Picasa

Picasa WebGoogle is currently testing a new version of its photo-management app Picasa in private beta that will let users post photo albums on the web via an integrated, Google-hosted service. You can learn some more about the service or put yourself on the beta waiting list at the Picasa Web site. Rafe Needleman at CNet's Web 2.0 Blog has posted a quick review of the functionality. He says at first blush the Picasa integration is quite good and publishing albums "couldn't be simpler." Galleries have nice, human-readable URLs, albums' design is clean and easy to navigate, and other Picasa users can import your photos into Picasa if you allow it. However Needleman identifies a few "snags," including the lack of password-protection for albums you want to keep private and the mysterious absence of captions. His biggest complaint is the lack of synchronization between Picasa and Picasa Web: Once you've uploaded an album, changes to images, titles, etc. in Picasa don't transfer over. He's also unsatisfied with the amount of storage space--only 250MB for free accounts compared to Gmail's 2.7GB+. For $25/year you can get 6GB of storage, but Needleman doesn't think that's a good value, and I'd have to agree. Though he isn't overly impressed with Picasa Web's feature set, he does say, "I don't know of a simpler or faster way to share photos." If you want to see what Picasa Web's online albums look like, take a look at the demo gallery.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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