Picasa Web Albums was updated today with a new function that helps the album owners to create attractive slideshows and share them with friends. As you might know, Picasa Web Albums is an online photo sharing platform that allows all the users to upload their pictures on the servers, create albums, organize images and share them with other Internet users. Today, Google revealed one new function that brings improved functionality for the solution, allowing the creation of flash slideshows using your albums. The most interesting function is surely the embed feature that gives even more power to Picasa because you're now able to embed any flash slideshow created with the online solution into any website.

"You can use our free photo sharing service, Picasa Web Albums, to create nifty portable Flash slideshows that you can easily embed in any blog or web page. The playback controls are built right in -- just roll over the slideshow to reveal them -- and it just takes a quick click for friends to get started on creating their own masterpiece," Tammy McLeod, Software Engineer, Picasa Web Albums, said today.

As the Google employee mentioned, the flash slideshow is quite easy to use and provides an excellent functionality and quality. The controls that allow you to browse the pictures are included into the flash, being displayed once you roll the mouse cursor over the images.

A few days ago, the Google rival Yahoo debuted a flash preview of the results returned by the Japanese version of Image Search. The flash product is somehow similar to the recently introduced Google product, allowing users to view all the results returned by the search technology as a slideshow. However, this latest improvement can be regarded as a Google reply for the recent Flickr updates made by Yahoo for their online photo sharing service.