Today was full of Google tech news - exciting stuff for technophiles, but the rest of you can just stop reading now.

First, Google announced and released a new web browser to compete with Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. It's been rumored for years but today's news was basically a surprise. I've already downloaded and installed Google's new browser, known as "Chrome". It's only in beta right now but I was still majorly disappointed. Thumbs down for now.

Next from Google today was the release of Picasa 3, the latest version of their great desktop photo organizing and editing software. As a professional graphic artist, I've been a longtime satisfied user of Picasa for my home photos. It's quick, it's easy, and it's powerful (but not PhotoShop powerful). This new version 3 adds so many more great new features, including retouching (really impressive), automatic red-eye reduction, video editing, text overlays, and auto-syncing to Picasa Web Albums. Big thumbs up!

And speaking of Picasa Web Albums, Google just today introduced people tagging, just like on Facebook. That's cool, but the coolest part is Google's new face recognition software. Picasa went through all of my online photos and identified over 300 faces. Then Google grouped similar faces together so I could identify who the person was and tag them. It wasn't always perfect but it did a good job with recognizing similar faces (especially since Patty is a twin). It took me less than 10 minutes to tag over 300 faces.

Labels: internet, photos