The thing about useful stuff is: Byebye Hello

Byebye Hello Friday, May 09, 2008

There may be many alternate ways to achieve the same thing, but I liked the photo-messaging service from Google called Hello, which formed part of the Picasa suite. Why? Because it was the easiest way for me to send photos to my parents and reliably ensure that

they saved to their hard drive without them having to do anything
I could offer a commentary as she went through them because the application allowed you to see which photos the other person was viewing

Now Google have apparently announced they are to close the service on May 15th. It's a great shame they don't simply allow the service to continue to operate, even if it was on an unsupported basis with no further development, especially since it operated on a peer-to-peer basis as far as I understood it, albeit with centralised log-on.