Google Bids Farewell To Hello

Google has announced that they will close Picasa’s Hello picture sharing service May 15.

Hello offered a free computer program that allowed users to send images across the Internet and publish them on blogs. The program was similar to instant messaging, with users able to send text to other users, but with a focus on digital photos.

Hello was an original pre-acquisition Picasa app and while supported in later versions of Picasa, was surpassed as Google focused on pushing photo sharing via Picasa Web Albums, Google’s (sort-of) Flickr competitor.

Google Blogscoped has more including some cached screenshot of the service.