My god, Mark really isn't that good at this CEO schtick is he.

My guess is they'll make that a webapp instead.

Webapp? They acquired Picnik and is in Flash. So IMO, they might shutdown Picnik and do something in HTML5 and javascript.

Most of the point of Picasa (the desktop software product, not Picasa Web Albums) is to collect and catalog your locally stored photos.

It wouldn't be a good fit for a webapp, even in an ideal everyone-has-HTML5 utopia world.

You still have the option of not using Google's services, and they even offer a clean way to purge your entire profile.

That's a point most people don't seem to remember. I can see what Google has on me, for the most part at any rate, and opt to destroy it. Contrast that with FB and I really have no clue what data they have on me.

I would think Google collects plenty of data behind the scenes which they do not share with you, like Facebook.

Could you elaborate on why you feel Google sucks?

Android achieves this well, too. I guess Apple are just following Google's move (remember when Google recorded all the wireless access points with their streetview vans?)

Are you able to enable the 'read-only-mode' using the same method?

They do have a read-only mode, don't they? I'm not sure why they don't enable read-only mode when things like this happen. It may be that Amazon's service being down forbids this. I dunno.

They have a read-only mode for "free" which is their akamai cache that the unlogged in users see.