Goodbye Hello…we hardly knew ye

Picasa is Google’s terribly underrated and until recently, completely unknown photo editing software. Which means the number of people who knew about Hello had to number in the hundreds. Hello was a great way to send photos to friends. You could carry on an IM conversation while flipping through photos, and you could even auto-follow your friend’s view so you could be on the same page. They got the full size pictures without any right-clicking or decompressing nonsense, and I’ve never met someone who couldn’t immediately figure out how to use it. My mother (and Kodak) lament that as cool as digital photos are, no one ever prints them, and as a result, the bonding time looking over a photo album has been replaced by hunching over a laptop screen (if that).posies for hello's demise

Google says they’re discontinuing Hello so they can focus on Picasa and Web Albums. Both are neat, but I’m not sure they’re going to fill the void.

Maybe this is all so Google can use the blue chip domain name Hello.com for something more worthwhile, especially now that Apple scored me.com.

Goodbye, Hello.