Google has just announced Panoramio Groups for sharing photos with likeminded people. There's a directory for existing groups, and anybody can create a new one. Groups are a fundamental building block of a social network, and Panoramio has joined that club.

We've covered Panoramio as competition for Photosynth, Microsoft's effort to stitch together photos into 3D places and build them into Bing Maps. Panoramio's role in Google Maps and Google Earth is one of providing personal color and context to a place. This is a rather different kind of photo sharing than the kind that organizes snapshots into galleries. Some new apps, such as Trover, take this same approach to photos as ways of exploring places. Panoramio's groups will bring an element of collaboration to the adventure.

A storm is brewing in the photo-sharing space. The flurry of mobile photo-sharing apps is one thing, but the very social networks where we host and display our images are in flux. Photographers are pronouncing the death of Flickr, Facebook is changing its long-held policy of opt-out photo tagging, and Google Plus has saved Picasa with its instant uploading and unlimited storage. Even Twitter is adding photo galleries, and while they're not Flickr-style, full-featured works of art, they're great for the kinds of informal moments that get tweeted.

These services are beginning to distinguish themselves from one another. A photo gallery with comments is a kind of Web experience we're all used to by now. In response, the major photo services are either adding distinguishing features or they're stagnating. Panoramio had its distinguishing feature first, though, and it's only now beginning to build a social layer on top of it.

Where do you host and share your photos? Let us know in the comments

Google is not known for smooth design, but it seems to be trying harder to give users a pleasurable experience. "This simple and intuitive online album experience makes it easier to explore all the wonderful photographs of places all over the world," the company wrote on its Lat Long blog.

Google Images got a similar makeover for the better this summer, introducing a new interface with search results tiled down a single page that can display up to 1,000 photos and a prettier way to enlarge any photo you want to see better in a lightbox displayed over the source page.

Google is making photo-viewing better, but that's not all it's done. Users can flip easily through high resolution photos that they can click on to get to relevant sites on the Web.

Users of Panoramio, Google's photo-sharing site that emphasizes geo-tagging, or Google Places can upload and geo-tag photos. Google also pulls from around the Web for the photos it displays on Place Pages.

Google's push for a better user experience comes as Microsoft presents well-designed products like Bing and Street Slide that directly compete with Google services, and as Apple continues to introduce more people to its religion of good design.

Which Google products do you think are well-designed?

Great for Cities - But not for Sights

While this worked quite well for the examples Google gives in its blog post, a few of our other searches ('Yosemite National Park' for example), did not bring up any photos. Any search for a city, however, always gave us related images from the photo layer in Google Maps. Searches for local restaurants and sites typically don't bring up any images and searches for local sights already brought up search results from Google Images anyway, and from what we can see, nothing has changed there.

It's nice to see, however, that Google now surfaces more images. It is also worth pointing out that yesterday, Google also announced that users can now easily filter Google Images by Creative Commons license, which, until now, was really the domain of Yahoo's Flickr, which hosts the world's largest repository of CC-licensed images.

Competing With Bing

Of course, we also can't help but think that the fact that Google is facing renewed competition from Bing, which also does a nice job of mixing up images with local search results - though not quite as nicely as Google now does. Travel is one of the areas where Bing excels, and it is good to see that the competition in this market is driving all players to innovate and improve their services.