Picasaweb popularity by country

Still investigating the popularity of Picasaweb, I thought about looking into which countries (or strictly which TLD's) are responsible for the most links to Picasaweb.  My findings were initially surprising to say the least.

All numbers were obtained by doing a search for "picasaweb.google.com" together with "site:tld" - all done at the main google.com site.

For reference, without specifying a TLD gives 412000 results.  (Remember, these numbers are always an estimate - but [probably] - see the conclusion, good enough for our purposes).

• com 278000
• org 32400
• net 18800
• nl 15700
• tw 11000
• pl 593
• cn 433
• ru 386
• de 322
• fr 305
• jp 239
• uk 208
• ca 202
• info 182
• us 76
• edu 154
• dk 133
• it 130
• no 115
• il 104
• be 104
• se 99
• br 99
• au 87
• cc 72
• at 65
• es 54
• ch 42
• biz 42
• ie 25

So, links from .com domains dominate as expected, with healthy showing from .org and .net domains.

The first countries to show up are a real surprise - the Netherlands and Taiwan, and in fact they are the only ones with a significant presence that I found.  (Normally you would expect the UK, Japan and Germany to top the country rankings here).

Next in fact, but massively behind the two top countries are Poland, China and Russia, and it is only after those that you get back to something closer to expectations, with Germany, France, Japan, UK and Canada occupying the next few spots.

What can explain this strange set of results?  Perhaps the Dutch have taken to Picasaweb in a big way, much as Brazil has made Orkut its own.  I' dont know - I'll certainly be trying to delve more into these figures - and to see if I can back them up with further results.

Some comparative figures searching at Yahoo are:

• [all] 31941 (yes, that's less than other figures!)
• com 88000
• net 11200
• org 10800
• tw 2890
• pl 1050
• nl 994
• cn 933
• ca 597
• de 515
• uk 452
• ru 367
• fr 290
• jp 196

The disparity here is not as pronounced, but it still shows Taiwan, Poland, Netherlands and China ahead of the more usual high rankers of Canada, Germany, UK and Japan.

Live.com has the following:

• (all) 14635 (yes, again less than later figures!)
• com 29605
• org 1587
• net 1381
• ru 460
• uk 367
• cn 318
• nl 308
• de 267
• jp 195
• ca 174
• pl 166
• tw 138
• fr 97

These figures are much closer to the expected ranking - its beginning to look as if Google has been misled.

Returning to the Google results for nl, paging through the results shows that after just 128 entries, Google gives up and says that the rest of the results have been omitted.  Choosing to display those explains a lot - it looks as if the nl result numbers have been inflated by forum spam - there are lots of results from various threads all at the same forum site.  In general Google is better than the other search engines in indexing dynamic pages (such as forums often produce), and that seems to have affected the numbers in the initial estimates.  Taiwan also gives up after displaying just 140 results. Oh well, maybe the Google numbers are not "good enough for our purposes" after all.

So the general conclusion to be taken from this is that the majority of (link) support for Picasaweb actually comes from the regular .com, .org, and .net domains - corresponding to a lot of American users, and widespread support from early adopters around the world who use the .com domain as its worldwide meaning.

[A useful paper on estimating size of search engine indexes, and explaining some of their biases is Random Sampling from a Search Engine’s Corpus].

Christina - the new Picasa Groups guide

Picasa has a number of support groups which are hosted on Google Groups.  These get the occasional post by a Picasa employee, but they are not that regular.

However, it seems that a new Google / Picasa employee has been given responsibility to post to these groups under the "Google Picasa Guide" profile.

According to her introductory post on Dec 7th (which announced the availability of Picasa Web Albums in 18 international languages), her name is Christina, and

"I'm your new Picasa Guide on Help Groups. :) Not long ago I was an
everyday Picasa user just like you, and I've received a lot of helpful
tips and troubleshooting advice from this Group. Now I'm on the other
side of the fence and I'm looking forward to this new role!"

Since then, her posts have also covered

• storage updates available internationally
• New features: video upload, prints, search

and a number of quick additions to ongoing threads.  Let's hope that this is indicative of a new emphasis on support from the Picasa team.

How many photos does Flickr host?

Thomas Hawk noted in a post about the growth of Flickr that for Flickr "one metric (number of photos online ... can be publicly obtained)".

He didn't note where such info was available, but a little digging shows that uploaded photos get a unique number assigned to them, that equates to the number of images previously uploaded.  Note that Thomas has it wrong - it's not easy to get the number of photos online, but it is easy to get the number uploaded.  Some number of images get deleted - presumably a very small percentage, but the number currently online will be smaller than those which have ever been uploaded.

Ignoring this difference between the numbers, a good source of historical trends of photos uploaded can thus be found by checking the numbers assigned to images uploaded over the period of time that flickr has been available.  A suitable account to check is that of Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr, and thus a regular poster from the beginning to the present time.

Her account shows the following dates and numbers: (I've just picked sufficient datapoints to show a trend)

• 15-Dec-03 88
• 31-Dec-03 276
• 26-Feb-04 7445
• 31-May-04 39772
• 29-Sep-04 631538
• 31-Dec-04 2751945
• 31-Mar-05 7964208
• 29-Jun-05 22524347
• 30-Sep-05 48112787
• 30-Dec-05 79628416
• 31-Mar-06 120824395
• 28-Jun-06 177531266
• 29-Sep-06 256102864
• 29-Dec-06 338061633

 

Quickly turning that into a graph shows the following:

The growth was exponential, but there are signs that the rate of growth may be slowing down - the last 3 points on the total uploads are very close to a straight line, and the growth values that I've plotted as a derived line confirm this with the last 2 data points here almost horizontal.

However, it should be noted that the 100 million, 200 million, and 300 million uploaded files all happened in 2006, and that at a rate of almost 1 million uploads per day that's a huge amount of data by anyone's standards.  Remember also that much of this is tagged with metadata that makes finding and using the images so much easier - there are tens of millions of images that have been geotagged with latitude and longitude for example.

Picasaweb popularity revisited

I recently compared a couple of measures of the popularity of Picasaweb compared to Flickr by looking at the number of links to the sites, and showing the Google Trends graphs which shows search queries for the two sites.

The results showed that Flickr beats Picasaweb by a couple of orders of magnitude on the link measure, though as the trends graph has no units, we can't read much into that, beyond the "Picasaweb is massively less popular" conclusion.

A number of other blogs picked up on the post, and made valuable points either within the post, or in the comments thereto:

• Googlified did a similar trends graph, extended in a couple of ways
  • showing picasaweb and "picasa web" as a single entity, to account for whether people search for this as one or two words (which made almost no difference to the shape of the graph at all)
  • adding in other photosharing sites webshots and imageshack (both less popular than Flickr) and photobucket (more popular than Flickr) for further comparisons

The comments to that post suggest that people also search for "picasa" when looking for "picasa web albums" which may be true in a proportion of cases, but I suspect that the vast majority of such searches are for the desktop application called Picasa, not the web service.  Google Trends shows that picasa and flickr are on a par in popularity as search terms.

A second comment also points out the obvious, that picasaweb is much newer than flickr, and that we should check back in a couple of years time to see how it is doing then!

• Mike DelGaudio wonders whether I asked the right question! He points out that although both sites share photos, the feature sets are not equivalent - Picasaweb is so far missing the huge social aspect that makes Flickr so valuable.

There is another trend tool available via IceRocket.  The graph it presents for picasaweb, picasa, and flickr tells a similar story - over the past 3 months picasaweb was mentioned on average on 6 blog posts per day, compared to 1900 for flickr.

A further set of hard numbers relating to popularity would be to compare numbers of photos hosted by each service, and numbers of (registered) users.  However, it's not easy to come up with accurate numbers for these.

Update: I've found how to get upload number for Flickr.

Too late for Voting for Your Favorite Photo-Sharing Site

Mashable ran a vote to find the favourite photo sharing site.  In an ironic twist, Mashable, which profiles slick Web 2.0 social networking sites elected to hold the vote by having votes cast by entering comments on the blog entry - hardly a slick way to conduct such matters.

The choice of sites you could vote for was:

• Flickr
• Pickle
• Zooomr
• ImageShack
• BubbleShare
• Webshots
• Photo.net
• Tabblo
• Parazz
• Shutterfly
• Kodak Gallery
• Photoblog.com
• Twango

PhotoBucket was explicitly excluded, because they sponsored the poll.  Picasa Web Albums were not even listed.

Voting seemed to go in bunches, perhaps as news of the vote appeared on various blogs, some of them with a vested interest!  In fact voting continued after the winner was declared (and the post is still open for new comments even now).  The post appeared on the 22nd December, and the winners were declared on the 24th December.

The winner was Flickr, with Twango as the people's choice, and Zooomr getting a special mention.

Ideas for Improving Picasa Web Albums

Google have been doing some promotion of Picasa Web Albums via a "tip" that appears at the top of search queries containing certain trigger words.  Specifically a search that contains the words "photo" and "sharing" together in that order gives a tip of

Tip: Want to share pictures? Try Google's Picasa Web Albums

Searches that just contain "photo" or similar words give a tip of

Tip: Looking for pictures? Try Google Images

Similarly searches related to blogs and blogging have a tip directing users to Blogger.

 

This behaviour has been criticised by a number of bloggers, who view it as human tampering with Google's search results.  In the middle of such a discussion on the Google Blogoscoped forum, there was an interesting exchange between Philipp (the site owner), and Ionut, a regular contributor:

Ionut asked:

Philipp, let's say you are Larry Page, you have a product called Picasa Web Albums, with a market share of 0.04%, and you want more users. What would you do?

Philipp replied:

I'm billionaire then, right? So I'd probably take a loong vacation first. :)
Seriously, I would:
- rename Picasa Web Albums to Google Pictures (or Google Photos)
- move it to pics.google.com
- make it possible to upload PNGs, BMP, TIFF, PCX, etc., which will all convert to JPG, PNG or GIF for display (but the original version will keep intact)
- put some unobtrusive AdSense in the application
- offer the option to have real password-protection/ invitation system for private pictures
- easily allow people to add a Creative Commons license to their pictures
- advertise on Flickr by buying Flickr ads (if Flickr allows this)
- advertise on blogs using the various ad networks/ AdWords-AdSense
- put a link to Google Pictures onto the Google homepage for a couple of days, to see how people react (the spot below the search box)
- potentially, put Google Pictures in the homepage's "more box"
- create a clearer navigation for Google Pics because the current one is partly confusing
- make it easier to understand what others visiting your URL will see; this is completely confusing right now
- add some killer features to Google Pics, like pattern matching search algos, that will draw many people to the site and increase word-of-mouth propaganda among tech-savvy people (who will then evangelize the not-so-savvy crowd)
- create a Google Pics-wide search engine for all photos, not just favorited albums
- allow much more storage; beat competition like Gmail storage beat competition when it was released
- create an online photo retouching tool using the latest technologies; integrate this with Google Pics
- additionally, buy Corel PhotoPaint, fix the bugs, and release it for free – and add an upload functionality to Google Pics
- integrate Hello functionality, kill Hello (but announce this in a blog post first giving transparent reasons)

In other words, I'd do what every other competitor with an image app will have to do to gain market share: improve the product. Only monopolies stop improving the product, which in the end, is bad for the user.

Would I advertise the product as a "tip" in search results? Only if that wouldn't go against what I previously told people. Only if that wouldn't go against core beliefs previously stated. Whether or not the current tip does that, again, everyone can make up their mind about. I consider it a tipvertisement, so it's neither a clear advertisement nor a clear tip.

Ionut provided his own suggestions:

Here's what I'd do.
- Integration with Gmail. You can save photo attachments to Picasa Web and send photos from Picasa Web.
- Integration with Image Search. Everytime you perform a search, you can see search results from your photos / your contacts' photos.
- Move Picasa online. Photo editing, effects, collages.
- Create an extension for Firefox to upload photos faster.
- Upload / view photos on mobile phones.
- 5 GB space storage for free.
- Add NevenVision technology for object recognition, face recognition.
- Every photo you upload to Google in each and every service (Blogger,Docs) should also be saved in Picasa Web.
- Easy geo-tagging, integration with Google Maps.
- How to make money:
* backup CDs
* high-quality prints
* find people from your photos in other public photos

These suggestions are not particularly new, just it's useful to see them all together.  The need for a full search feature in particular is one I've highlighted a number of times before.

One item that's not on these lists is to start official blogs for Picasa and Picasa Web Albums - there's plenty to talk about for these two Google services, and it's silly not to have an official outlet for them.

I think a lot of the under promotion of Picasa and Picasa Web Albums is due to the small, still largely independant team that work on these.  Perhaps Google should look to increase the size of the team significantly - it's unclear yet whether the Neven Vision staff have been added to the Picasa team, or have ended up elsewhere within Google.

How popular is Picasaweb?

I was trying to place some numbers on how popular Picasaweb was in comparison to flickr, and turned up the following numbers via various means:

via Technorati (where 2 numbers are given, the smaller is the links from the past 180 days)

• picasaweb.google.com 112,475 links
• flickr.com 8,148,696 links (3,644,097 links from 204,288 blogs)

via ://URLFAN

• picasaweb.google.com: Ranks 710 out of 1,844,043 sites. Mentioned in 247 unique feeds. Mentioned in 440 posts.
• flickr.com: Ranks 1 out of 1,844,043 sites. Mentioned in 29778 unique feeds. Mentioned in 95950 posts.

via Google

• picasaweb.google.com: 402,000
• flickr.com: 24,700,000

 

A general picture emerges of interest in Picasaweb being at most a few percent of that in flickr.  Google Trends does not give hard numbers, but its graph is still telling - picasaweb (in red) barely shows up, whereas flickr (in blue) continues a long upward trend in popularity.

 

Note that these numbers are all tracking interest in the two sites - I'm still looking at how I can come up with numbers to indicate the numbers of photos hosted by each of the sites.

New blog by Mike DelGaudio

Mike DelGaudio has just started a blog with the tag line "Learning everything I can, with an emphasis on photo editing, photo sharing and Picasa".

In just a week of posts he's covered a lot of ground, with a number of useful tips about getting the best from Picasa.

As you might expect, he's also making use of Picasa Web Albums to illustrate his techniques.

Picasa upgrades to version 2.6

As well as upgrading Picasa Web Albums, Google have rolled out a new version 2.6 of Picasa on the desktop.

The Picasa readme page notes the major changes as being:

• Added Vista / Internet Explorer 7 support
• Changed update behavior so that it now automatically downloads updates in the background
• Picasa Web Albums is now available in 18 languages

In addition, the release notes page has been updated with news of both this release (build 35.94), and also the previous builds of 32.97 and 32.95 which had not previously been documented.  This adds more details to recent changes, which notably include:

• New autoupdate behavior for Windows Vista support
• New CD/DVD-burning engine (supports more devices)
• Improved upload reliability to Picasaweb
• Added support for 18 new languages
• Added XMP metadata parsing
• Fixed a problem where incorrect GPS values were being saved under certain conditions.

Removed functions

What the readme and release notes do not list is that some functionality appears to have been removed with this "upgrade".  Specifically there are now just 2 items on the Experimental menu under Tools.  This menu also used to have "Publish via FTP..." and "Upload to Google Video..." on it.  It's the nature of experimental things that they may not work out in the future, but I think it's worth a comment on both of these lost items.

Upload to Google Video...

I guess that this was seen as unnecessary since anyone can now upload videos to their own Picasa Web Albums, and having two upload destinations for video may have been too confusing.  It must be noted however that uploading videos to Picasa Web Albums is not the same as uploading to Google Video for two very important reasons:

•  videos in Google Video have a search engine available, so that people can find them easily
• videos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums count against your storage space limits, whereas Google Video essentially has unlimited space

Publish via FTP...

Not sure exactly what the use case for this was expected to be.  It's possible that this was also deemed unnecessary now that Blogger Beta has improved integration with Picasa.

Picasaweb gets search

Google have updated Picasaweb with a number of features, key amongst which is the ability to search through Picasaweb photos, together with the ability to order prints from photos, and now anyone not just those with a paid hosting plan can upload videos.  The briefest of details are available on the What's New page.

In Google's own words, the additions are

Anyone can upload videos using Picasa
Finally, a way to share those digital camera movies with friends. Learn more

Search and tag your photos. Search over your friend's public photos
Hey, we're Google. Search across album descriptions, captions, our new tags and more.

Order prints and photo products
If one of our print providers sells it, you can order it.

(I note that despite updating this What's New page, they still haven't corrected the link in the footer, which still links to the Mac Tools Terms of Service  rather than the Picasaweb Terms of Service).

 

The search still does not allow for a full search over all Picasaweb pages - it mostly searches through your own albums, or those that you mark as favorites.  However, it will search through any other single album that you are currently in, even if that is not one of your favorites (indeed you don't even have to be logged in to do such a search).

The ordering of prints currently offers two print providers - Photoworks and Shutterfly (Both US based, even if you are not a US user of Picasaweb), but that thankfully also works without you having to be logged in to Picasaweb.  To avoid favoring one of these providers over the other, they are presented in a random order.

The features are still a little rough around the edges, for example the help message you get when there are no search matches contains two typos that I spotted - Sometimes you'll only want results that include an exact phrase. In this case, simply put quotation marks around your search teams. For example, you could be type "the long winding road".

However, with these additions, together with the recent ability for non US customers to purchase paid hosting plans, Picasaweb is slowly turning into the killer photo hosting site it should have been from the start.

Update: It looks like Google have discovered some major problem with the search function, and have temporarily withdrawn the feature.  Less than an hour after I posted, the feature is no longer available (though it's still documented on the What's New page).  The Order Prints feature is still available.

Update: A few hours later and the features have returned.  There's also a post about the new features on the main Google blog.