How To Move Your Facebook Photos To Picasa (Soon, Google Photos) In A Flash

I’m sure there’s more than one way to easily transfer your Facebook photos and albums to Google’s Picasa service (which will apparently be renamed Google Photos soon, according to social media industry blog Mashable). If you know of a good method for moving from one to the other, do share it in a comment below, but I would like to highlight one that launched very recently.

The aptly named Move2Picasa.com website lets you connect to your Facebook account, after which all your Facebook photos and albums will automatically be migrated over to Google’s Picasa service. Note: sans captions, comments and whatnot.

It admittedly took a couple of hours for me to get my Facebook photos transferred, but for people who don’t mind the wait and would like to move only their photos to Picasa / Google Photos, this is a more than adequate solution.

Evidently, the more photos you (and others) migrate, the longer the wait. Another caveat: it’s all or nothing – you can’t transfer specific photos or albums at this point.

Needless to say, once your photos are in Picasa, sharing them with Circles (or the world) on Google’s brand new social networking service, Google+, can be done in a snap.

The web app was conceived by AmiWorks’ Aman Kumar Jain and Amogh. According to the website, roughly 300,000 photos have already been transferred to date.

My guess is there’ll be plenty more by the end of the week.

Mark Zuckerberg Is The Most Followed User On Google+

In what has to be somewhat embarrassing for Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is the most followed user on Google+, according to the Google+ Statistics counter.
The Facebook CEO has 21,213 followers, compared to the Google CEO at 14,798, Google social czar Vic Gundotra at 13,783, Google co-founder Sergey Brin at 11,629, blogger Robert Scoble at 11,389, Google spam avenger Matt Cutts at 9,153, TWIT founder Leo Laporte at 7,566, Google’s Bradley Horowitz at 7,187, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler at 6,579 and blogger Gina Trapani at 5,649.
Google+ Statistics creator Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten explains the CEO’s unlikely popularity thus, “He has the most friends in the world, they made a movie about him, and he is more handsome than the Larry and Sergey.” I think the answer goes more like this; The more media coverage someone receives related to Google+, the more followers they get, hence MG Siegler at #9.

Facebook Engineer Builds Google+ Inspired Facebook Hack

With many asserting that Google+ is heavily Facebook influenced, Facebook Engineer Vladimir Kolesnikov has flipped the switch and taken inspiration from the novel Google Circles design with Circlehack, a much simpler tool to build Facebook Friend lists.

Right now the only way you can create lists on Facebook is by going to the Friends page, clicking on the Account drop down menu, then clicking on “Edit Friends” and then again on “Create a List” and a bunch of other cumbersome stuff.

It’s a mess, but crucial if you want to achieve the same granular sharing features as Google+ on Facebook (which you can do by going to “Privacy Settings,” clicking “Customize,” then under “Make this open to” click oh hell just Google it).

While Circlehack doesn’t have all the design features of Google+ e.g. the circles your friends are members of don’t glow upon hover and you can’t automatically set Groups or privacy settings within the app, it’s a start, at least for Facebook.

Well played Kolesnikov, well played.

Paul Adams: Seeing Google+ In Public Is Like Bumping Into An Ex-Girlfriend.

Ex-Google UX guy Paul Adams is perhaps most known for his slideshow “The Real Life Social Network,” which highlighted the perils of having one default group for sharing and emphasized that the ideal social networking service would be designed for multiple groups. The slideshow illustrated the flaws in Facebook’s lump sum friend model and called for a social network where users could set sharing levels to correspond to the 4-6 separate relationship groups that people tend to have.

Sound familiar? Well, if this reminds you a little of Google+ Social Circles, its because Adams was a User Experience Researcher on Google social/Google+ until he left Google in December 2010. The first version of his famous “The Real Life Social Network” deck was published in April 2010, at least two months before the project started (with an even earlier version published two years ago).

While designer Andy Hertzfeld and team have been lauded for the (granted) amazing design, it’s less discussed that Hertzfeld inherited the Circles model from Adams, and simply designed the front-end user experience for it.

Poetically enough, Adams, who is now at Facebook, was asked by current Googler Chris Messina on Google+ what he thought about the service. He responded by elaborating on a tweet where he likened the experience of the Google+ launch to seeing an ex-girlfriend in public.

Adams wrote, “It was like when you first see her you have a moment where you have a niggle of regret and wonder for a split second, but that quickly passes when you remember why you broke up with her.”

Adams directed me to Facebook PR when asked for further comment on his opinion and involvement on Social Circles. I’m sure their response will be fascinating. While we wait, you can flip through the slideshow that started it all, below.

Facebook,is set to launch a new feature next week, possibly in the mobile or tablet arena, its CEO said.

Chief Executive and founder Mark Zuckerberg told reporters in a visit to Facebook's Seattle office on Wednesday that the company planned to "launch something awesome" next week.

He said the project had been developed at the 40-person Seattle office, Facebook's only major engineering center outside of its Palo Alto, California headquarters.

There has been speculation in technology blogs in recent weeks about various mobile products in development at Facebook, including the release of a long-awaited Facebook app for Apple Inc's iPad and a specialized app for photo-sharing on the iPhone.

Facebook's Seattle office has made a mark on the company's mobile efforts, playing a central role in the development of Facebook's unified mobile site, unveiled in March.

A Facebook spokesman declined to provide further details about Zuckerberg's comments.

Facebook, the world's largest Internet social network with more than 500 million users, is increasingly challenging established online companies like Google Inc and Yahoo Inc for consumers' time online and for advertising dollars. According to the company, people that use Facebook on mobile devices are twice as active on the service than users on PCs.