You Can Now Share Private Picasa Albums with Buzz

Google Buzz had already been integrated with Picasa, but now Google has added a small but important feature, the possibility to post private Picasa albums to Buzz.

Google Buzz may have had a rough start, but Google is not giving up on it anytime soon. In fact, it has been working on making it better and integrating it with more services.

"It used to be all or nothing when it came to sharing a new Picasa Web Album in Buzz. If you created a public album in Picasa Web Albums, it created a public Google Buzz post," Jonathan Sposato, Product Manager with the Google Photos team, wrote.

"That was great for when you wanted to share your photos broadly. But for those times when you wanted to share with a smaller circle — no Buzz," he explained.

"Now when you create a private album, the select people you choose to share your photo album with will see a notification in Google Buzz as well," he announced.

First and foremost, you need to have Picasa linked up with Buzz so that your activity is automatically published.

Until now, every time you uploaded a public album, a Buzz notification would send out to your followers, available for everyone on the web to see, just like the album.

But if you shared an album with just a handful of people, you were out of luck. Now though, the people you share the album will also be able to see the Buzz message as well, provided they are using the service, of course.

It's not a huge feature, but it does show that Google is committed to making Buzz work. Of course, it remains to be seen if this determination will carry over once the rumored Google Me is launched. And it also remains to be seen what role Buzz will play in the upcoming social network.