ON MORE APPLE GOOGLE COLLABORATION?

WHERE IN THE WORLD?

There's a post on Mactelchat by a user Jarvester, titled "iPhoto 6.0.5 shows evidence of Google Collaboration", that's gathering some attention on Techmeme this morning. 

It starts off with this breathless premise:

"In the middle of preparing an article speculating what Apple and Google are up to with Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently joining Apple's board, I decided to poke around iPhoto to see if one of my suspicions held water.

And much to my pleasant surprise, I found concrete evidence that the two companies are up to something!

Just look at these screenshots!" 

The screenshots go on to illustrate the following:

"...going through the iPhoto executable itself with a Hex Editor, I managed to unearth more than 70 references to GPS! (e.g. gpsAltitude, gpsEorWLongitude, gpsLongitudeSeconds, showGPS, updateGPSInfo and mGPSShowButton)

The GPS fields in iPhoto is not exactly earth-shattering news. GPS EXIF info has been in iPhoto for a while now. But the inclusion of Google Maps and the hidden Show button certainly is."

If true, it shows that Apple is logically adding geo-location capability to it's iPhoto application, a feature that Yahoo! rolled out recently for it's very popular, online only, Flickr photo service.

It remains to be seen though if the ability to add geographical tags in iPhoto, if and when the feature is actually introduced, is limited only to Google Maps. 

So although I find the potential inclusion of the feature itself of interest, I'm not sure I'd make it part of a grand Apple/Google collaboration lead from the top ( see earlier post on Google CEO Eric Schmidt joining Apple's board).

For the moment, it just looks like Apple playing catch up for a change, on a logical feature for one of it's many software applications.