Google's Flickr Killer (should that be killr?)

Red66 has made a couple of posts in the past few days about Picasa / Picasa Web Albums, and how they compare to flickr.

Google’s Flickr Killer is about how Picasa's simplicity is key, and the reason why Yahoo (who own Flickr) need to get their hands on a desktop photo application. Whilst Red66 would like to upload from Picasa direct to Flickr, he sees that it's unlikely that Google would provide such a feature, now that they have their own web albums service.

In Google’s Flickr Killer - Part 2 there is more consideration of what Google need to do to Picasa to make it the killer application he believes it can be - merging the convenience of the desktop application, with the best of breed web albums service.

His list of 10 necessary improvements given is below [my comments in square brackets thus]:

1. Provide more storage space
2. Allow direct links to images at multiple sizes, so they can be placed on blogs etc
3. Tags - both making this easy in the desktop app, and making sure those tags get uploaded to the web version
   
4. Geotags [well Picasa has this on the desktop side, so I guess the point here is to do things with them on the web albums]
5. A powerful API [Not sure if this is mean to be an API for the desktop app, or one to the web service - I argue that both are needed]
6. Ad-supported, with revenue share to the photo owners
7. Comments and notes [Comments are allowed now - I think this may be a new feature just added to the web service]
8. RSS Feeds for everything
9. Better GMail and Blogger integration
10. ... and search

Well, I agree with most of this - though as I've already written about earlier, I think that search is the key point that needs addressing above all others. The lack of an API is close behind, and I think this is necessary both on the desktop client side, and on the server side. With these two in place, I don't so much care about most of the other points, since they can then if necessary be addressed by third parties - though the need for more storage space would then perhaps become a limiting factor.

(The current paid upgrade on storage space, is only available in the USA - so at a minimum this needs to roll out worldwide, but an increase in the base allocation would be welcome as well.) I see the "ad supported, revenue sharing" as being the least important of this list.