“Google’s busy these days as the company pursues its IPO, fights mounting competition with Yahoo and Microsoft in the search arena and rolls out new features like Browse By Name. However, Google still found time to acquire digital photo management company Picasa to improve photo publishing on Google’s Blogger service (also a recent acquisition from Pyra Labs).”

Read more…

Google certainly isn’t wasting any time while readying for their IPO. They now have a complete chain from their Blogger.com blog site to the Hello! software that allows users to post photo blogs to the Picasa software that lets the users organize and manage their photo collections.

On the interesting question side is this: Every previous link in the chain is free- will Picasa now become free as well? I think that this may or may not happen. It would ‘annoy’ current users who have had to pay to register the application and I don’t suppose they want to tick off their customer base unless they offer some significant compensation- shall we say a share or two of Google stock?

Well, that’s just an idle thought, but one that I suspect would pacify even the most annoyed…