“This new feature lets you create a sub-community within Panoramio around a topic you’re passionate about, so you can easily engage with like-minded photographers and hobbyists,” says Panoramio Community Manager Gerard Sanz.

“For example, in my trips around the world, I always take the time to enjoy the local cuisine, like Costa Brava’s arròs negre,” adds Sanz. “So I created a group called “Food,” to give others a ‘taste’ of that region and get a glimpse of what fellow foodies are feasting on. My fellow group members—and by all means I hope you’ll become one of them!—can add their own photos, browse others’ and get culinary and travel inspiration.

There is Groups directory where users can find groups that fit their interests, and if not, create one themselves.

It will be interesting to see if Google integrates this with Google+, as Group photo sharing experiences have been kind of trendy in social media lately, though this is a bit of a different take on that.

Panoramio is the geolocation-centric photo-sharing site that Google acquired in 2007.  Picasa is the more traditional photo-sharing site Google’s owned since 2004.  Bringing them together makes sense, even if it’s not the timeliest move Google’s ever made.

As for some specifics, Roger Trias i Sanz, a software engineer at Panoramio, wrote in a post on the LatLong Blog, "[W]e are happy to announce that you can upload your pictures right from Picasa Web Albums into Panoramio.  By uploading your best photos of places into Panoramio you can share them with the Panoramio community and the world . . ."

Or you can not share them, of course.  Google’s apparently learned some lessons about unauthorized automation since the debut of Buzz, as the post made clear that photos must be both geotagged and in a public album to be transferred from Picasa to Panoramio.  Plus, users will have to be logged into a Panoramio account to start an upload.

All in all, this development has the potential to improve several of Google’s products without upsetting anybody.

"Tens of millions of mobile users own a device with a good camera and GPS," said Fernando Delgado of Panoramio. "We realize that a lot of these users may want to share photos of places with the rest of the world via Google Maps and Google Earth."

"The philosophy behind the app is to keep it simple: sign in (only the first time), pick a photo from your device or take a new photo, and upload it straight to Panoramio," explains Delgado. "If available, the geoposition will be automatically set, and you can optionally add a title to the photo."

This is the first time Panoramio has released a mobile app, but Google says it is working on an Android application to compliment it.

Panoramio photos are used on Google Earth and Google Maps as photo layers, where people all over th world can see them. The service lets users tag their photos under categories like art, buildings, etc.

This feature turns Street View into more than just a tool to find imagery of places you are looking to go to, but a virtual walkthrough photo gallery of the world. At least it has the potential for that. The places are limited at this point. The following video does a good job of explaining how users can interact with it and view user-submitted photos.

Currently, the feature is available for places like Paris, New York, San Francisco, Rome, Tokyo, Barcelona, Sydney, and New Zealand. There are others, and I would expect the number of places to grow tremendously as time goes on. "Anywhere, really, where Street View is available and where users have contributed lots of high-quality photos; of course, this usually is near famous landmarks but you never know where you’ll discover more to see," says Frederik Schaffalitzky, Software Engineer at Google Zurich.

Street View is drawing its photos from Panoramio. Users of this service in fact might already have photos in Street View. For the possibility of getting your photos in there, just contribute them to Panoramio and geo-tag them. For popular locations, competition will be stiff though.

Acquired by Google in May of last year, Panoramio is a photo-sharing site that specializes in geotagged images.  Users of Google Earth are then able to easily see the connections between pictures and the places in which they were taken, making for an experience that’s a little reminiscent of Street View.

 

The Panoramio layer doesn’t seem to have been updated as frequently as Street View, though – Frank Taylor writes, "The last major update was back in September when 1 million photos were added" – so the new development is worth noting.

As for when Google Earth and Panoramio users can next count on seeing some activity, a post on the Panoramio Blog states, "The date of the next update will be around January 15th and will include photos reviewed up to January 13th."

So if you’ve put off a holiday vacation, or are just tired of whatever landscape lies outside your window, Google’s got you covered for a little while.

“For years,” writes Scott Austin for Dow Jones, “Cisco Systems Inc. has been the most prolific acquirer of venture-backed start-ups, pocketing 22 such companies since 2004, according to industry tracker VentureOne.  But Google has emerged at the top of the list so far this year, acquiring five venture-backed start-ups to Cisco’s four.”

Granted, five isn’t as impressive a number as 22 (though the numbers are from admittedly different periods of time), but Austin adds, “[Google’s] showing no sign of stopping, as the search outfit looks for companies that fit its overarching mission: ‘To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’”

And as some recent purchases demonstrate – think PeakStream, Panoramio, GreenBorder, and FeedBurner, just in the last month or so – there are a lot of corporations that apparently fit into that mission.  Austin isn’t kidding when he describes Google as “the cash-oozing search giant.”

Is this a good thing?  Well, definitely, if you happen to have a company that you’re looking to sell off.  As for Google (and its competitors), it’s a little harder to say if this spending spree is the best use of money.  There’s no doubting that the search engine company’s plans have worked so far, however.

Javier Rodriguez Zapatero, the sales vice president of Yahoo Europe and executive president of Yahoo Spain, spoke about it to mad.co.uk.  “The customer sales support centre will provide Yahoo! Europe with a unique opportunity to enhance our display advertising strategy across Europe reaching the smaller advertisers in the five core European markets,” he said.

Those core markets, by the way, are the UK, Germany, Italy, France, and, naturally, Spain.

Spain actually seems to be a center of interest for the search market in recent days.  First Google bought Panoramio, which is based in Spain, and now Yahoo’s setting up camp in the same country.  Two dots don’t form a pattern, but the occurrences are still something worth noting.

Yet to all you would-be tourists in Barcelona: please don’t search for Yahoo’s customer support sales center.  Exciting as this stuff may be, you’re still probably much better off spending time at La Sagrada Familia.

• Ebay Purchases StumbleUpon for $75 million
• FeedBurner Sold! for $100 million to Google
• Google Buys Panoramio, Photo Mapping Software
• Fox Interactive Media (NWS) Acquires Photobucket and Flektor
• Google buys GreenBorder Technologies for more security in Google Apps
• Microsoft buys aQuantive Inc, for 6 billion US dollars
• CBS buys Last.fm
• AOL Buys Mobile Ad Network
• Microsoft Buys CareerBuilder; Google Interested In SimplyHired
• AOL Buys German Ad Server Adtech
• Yahoo Fully Acquires Right Media (April 30th)
• Facebook Partners with Oodle for Classifieds

Google and Microsoft seem to be positioning themselves strategically in order to keep up with each other in the war for Internet dominance. I expect to see this trend of acquisitions continuing strong into the summer.

Do leave a comment if I have missed any major partnerships or purchases.

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Panoramio “is a website that enables digital photographers to geolocate, store and organize their photographs – and to view those photographs in Google Earth and Google Maps,” as explained by a statement from Google.  The acquisition won’t change any of that; Panoramio will continue to be a default layer in Google Earth.

Yet, presumably because of the privacy concerns that pop up whenever Google is involved, Panoramio users are being provided with the opportunity to “opt out” of the acquisition.  Users who don’t choose this option – or who do nothing at all – will, at the close of the deal, have their Panoramio-related data and photos transferred to the search engine giant.

The acquisition will, however, “bring many advantages to Panoramio users, starting with a better infrastructure to improve the reliability of Panoramio, more frequent updates of Panoramio’s Google Earth layer, and more resources for some invisible tasks that take time out from working on new features,” according to “José, Joaquín and Eduardo” – Panoramio’s three leading men.  (Joaquín and Eduardo are actually co-founders.)

One last note – even as the $75 million deal between eBay and StumbleUpon is confirmed, we’ve been left in the dark about the financial details of the Google-Panoramio acquisition.  The terms were not disclosed, but, according to Panoramio’s Blog, the company was “very (and we mean very) happy” about the takeover.