July 5th, 2006
Picasa Web Albums: no more 6GB accounts?
As the observant Blogoscoped readers spotted, a link that once prompted users to upgrade their 250MB Picasa Web account to 6GB has recently disappeared. Could Google be getting ready to make this upgrade free?
It would be a welcome gesture if this is actually in the cards, but it could also be a sign they are evaluating their pricing strategy for the service. Until recently, the advertised price for the upgrade was $25 per year for 6GB — not too bad, but probably not very popular either.
Picasa Web is Google’s first web-based product (targeted at users) with the option to pay for an enhanced service. Given this, the upgrade strategy could have simply been an experiment designed to evaluate how users react to tiered services. If this is the case, pulling the upgrade option from the service could be an indication of what they learned.
For those who are interested, the logo seen above is the "Lighthouse" logo I found on the Picasa Web images directory. Lighthouse was the internal name for this service before it was released — it was also referred to in the the leaked presentation notes that also mentioned GDrive.
Garett Rogers is employed as a programmer for iQmetrix, which specializes in retail management software for the wireless industry.
See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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