A couple of google product launches

With all the focus on the launch of Chrome, there were a couple of recent launches that didn’t get as much attention as they should have.

Picasa added facial recognition technology, which detects and clusters faces in your photos and lets you do bulk labeling and stuff. It’s best explained in the video:

I did this for most of my photos, which you can see here.

Second, Google’s newspaper scanning project came online. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an easy way to actually get to the data, which is frustrating. I’ve found it really fascinating to go to a random town’s newspaper from a long time ago and just read random stories. It gives you a sense of what it must have been like back then, and isn’t as focused as a historical book would be. For example, Freedom Said Near for Roustabout in Circus Mystery Case, from the St. Petersburg Times, Nov 1941. Follow that link and take a look around the document, you’ll certainly find interesting and hilarious things.

And yeah, it’s an OCR nightmare.