Oops, Google broke it again

According to Google's company overview

"Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

That doesn't seem to apply to information about Picasa, where Google seems to be doing just the opposite - taking the few useful sources of information that do exist, and making them no longer accessible.

• When Picasa was first purchased by Google, the online support ran very useful forums, where there were authoritative postings by the Picasa developers themselves. These were to be found at http://forums.picasa.com
  
• Then Google scrapped the forums, losing all the collective information they contained, and instead switched online support to a (beta) Google group. For example, there was a very useful list of keyboard shortcuts at http://groups.google.com/group/picasa/browse_frm/thread/5b0013ca646149db
• In July 2006, Google again scrapped their existing Google groups, and created new ones, again making all the old accumulated questions and answers inaccessible via existing mechanisms.
  

The current situation is that the old forum URL redirects to the new Google Group, but bookmarks and links to posts in the old groups simply take you to a dead page.

The current set of Picasa related groups is:

• Picasa - the top level group that contains the other groups
• Picasa-Past-Discussions - where posts to the old group have been moved, so you can still search them, but your existing links and bookmarks are all broken. This group is read only, so no chance to make corrections or additions to old posts.
  
• PicasaGuide - Learn about and discuss the basic features of Picasa.
• PicasaSomethingBroken - Discuss tricky problems, find troubleshooting tips and check for bug fixes.
• PicasaWebAlbums - Discuss information about the new and improved features of Picasa.
• PicasaCommunity - Learn tips and tricks from other Picasa users.

In theory, whenever a Google employee posts to one of these groups they should do so using the name "Google Picasa Guide", but actually, the most active Googler (Tara Morrison) posts under her own "Tara" profile.

For those trying to find the shortcuts posting referenced above, its now at http://groups.google.com/group/Picasa-Past-Discussions/browse_thread/thread/5b0013ca646149db which is a trivial transformation of the old URL - so something that Google's system should be doing automatically.