Years ago, Google bought two cool products: Picasa and Blogger. It improved them, but kept the old names. Now Mashable’s Ben Parr is reporting that the Google+ rollout will involve redubbing these services as Google Photos and Google Blogs. Sounds logical to me–especially since the offering I think of as “Picasa” is actually “Picasa Web Albums.”

I helped to judge a cool contest for developers of channels for Roku’s Internet TV box–and Roku has announced the winners. (I judged the screensaver category, which was won by a nifty one which displays your Picasa Web Albums photos.)

Back in March, Google acquired Picnik, the online image editor that’s long been one of my favorite Web apps, period. It was pretty obvious that the company would link up Picnik with its Picasa Web Albums photo sharing service. And today, it’s announcing that it’s done so.

Continue reading this story…

I can never quite tell if Google considers its free Picasa image organizer/editor to be a Major Google Product–it doesn’t update it all that often, or promote it as energetically as it might. But it’s announcing Picasa 3.5 today, which should be available for Windows and OS X by the time you read this or soon thereafter. Google let me get my hands on it a bit early; Picasa fans should like it, and it gives those of us who haven’t checked out the app in a while new reason to revisit it.

Continue reading this story…