Google Closes Hello (What’s That Anyway?)
I’m reading that Google is closing Hello, which apparently was (and is, as I’m writing this), a photo sharing service that came with Picasa. I guess they feel it doesn’t fill a purpose anymore.
We originally embarked on a mission to make photo sharing easier and more fun with Hello. We plan to keep carrying that torch in new projects to come.
We hope that you continue to enjoy the other sharing products Google offers including Picasa, Picasa Web Albums and Google Talk.
More over at Google Blogoscoped, with some links to the old version. Matthew Ingram says that Hello was a really cool app, in which case it’s a shame it closes.
On May 15, Google can begin doing something really cool with hello.com, a truly premium domain name. Too bad for the users of the defunct service though.
I actually used Hello in the early days, and even got a t-shirt from the Picasa team (it says Hello…heh).
Unfortunately, Hello was plagued by error codes in its later years, which was compounded by the fact the program became a nesting ground for pornographers.
Hopefully Google will relaunch the domain as something else, or at least release the source code for hello to the community.
My wife uses Hello when she’s IMing other digital scrapbookers–it made it much more convenient to swap layouts and stuff like that. I’m sure she’s upset that it’s shutting down…
Hello is just one great example about how although Google is really good at making money they aren’t really good at marketing their new properties.