Google agrees to acquire Panoramio, it’s the heading of the latest Panoramio’s official blog. Besides, you can get the first-look into Panoramio by reading my another post on this geographical photo sharing site. Maybe we are now wondering on the shopping spree of Google in the recent months, but don’t forget how Panoramio work hand-in-hand with the Google products, Google Maps and Google Earth. Panoramio was doing the first-part job by enables digital photographers to geo-locate, store and organize their photographs, and users will view those photographs in Google Earth, as mentioned in the official Google blog.

At the same time, if users don’t want to pass their photos and personal information to Google, they would be given a chance to opt-out of the transfer of their personal information if Panoramio were acquired, as listed in the frequently asked questions section. Nevertheless, the above planned acquisition did not surprised the market as the momentum around this acquisition and partnership concept was far long created since the first day Panoramio launched in the market. On the other side, does this planned acquisition sounds that building products around Google and expect Google to buy into the intended visions is a good product strategy?

Panoramio, a geographical photo sharing site that created by a team of developers that based in Spain and Germany in 2005 has achieved another milestone. They have officially released their application programming interface (API), according to their official blog post. This is another achievement so far after a month ago, they have reached a record of ‘One Million Geolocated Photos‘ with them, in addition to more than 300,000 users have sign-up for their services since its first officially launched in October 2005.

The Panoramio API provides the user interface tool for the users to embed their favorite photos onto their blogs or websites. The beauty of using Panoramio is an user does not need to sign up for what is known as API key, an user only need to do some programming work, i.e. do a GET as shown in “How it works?” section of the Panoramio API page. However, for the users that wish to use the Panoramio API, they need to fulfill the stated requirements such as every photo displayed in the user’s site should include Panoramio’s name or logo and the link to the original photo at Panoramio.com must also be provided by an user. Examples of the sites that used Panoramio API are GPSies, EveryTrail, and WikiLoc.