Google Says Goodbye to “Hello”

This might come as sad news for some of you: Google will be shutting down Hello, Picasa's application used for sharing photos over the web. The Hello webpage will not be accessible starting with May15, this year. Hello has been part of the Picasa application ever since Google acquired the latter, back in 2004. clearly, Picasa users who are using the Hello service might have not expected this.

For those among you how don't know what Hello was, here's a little insight. According to Wikipedia, Hello was part of Google's Picasa and was a free software application that allowed users to send various images and pictures across the Internet. Users could upload the photos onto their own blogs, using the same program. The interface was pretty much the same as for an instant messaging application, but with Hello being more focused on digital photographs.

According to a web archive version of the Hello webpage, users had the possibility of interchanging photos, even through firewalls. The application was capable to allow its users to chat with one another, while viewing different pictures together. In order to make use of Hello, one would have to previously install the latest version of Google's Picasa.

At the moment, the Hello webpage is just displaying a message announcing its users that, with sadness, it is going to shut down on May15. Still, Google encourages its users to rely instead on its other products, including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk. Google also promises to take its experience with Hello and try to make it better with other future projects. At this point, it is not clear yet what Google intends to do with the domain, but we can say with certainty that some of its users are going to expect something to replace Hello.

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