Google acquired Picasa this month. And though it sounds like yet another business deal, there can be more to it! Picasa, I downloaded it, tried it and well, I kind of loved it. It’s a photo/image manager. And well, it’s the best I have seen till now on Windows Platform. It has lot of eye candy but still its quiet stable. It supports most of the popular formats and even videos. And the best thing is that it has a pretty decent image searching utility. So, that means Google now has functional image management software that is capable of making searches. If they can expand it to more file formats, they have a file manager on their hands. This is what they are expected to target next! Desktop Search. Picasa just seems to be like a solid step in that direction.

And here comes the surprise package of the lot. Along with Picasa, Google also acquired Hello. Though it is touted as an image sharing application, I found it to be pretty decent instant messaging client that does photo sharing as an extra! Its smaller download than Yahoo! Messenger (though no way as feature rich) but it works fine if you need to have a conversation with someone. And photo sharing works! Even on Dial-Up. It also allows you to select videos but only transfer a screenshot. But in the end its way better than mailing someone the images and then try to discuss that. I have tried Hello in a real life scenario with a potential client and discussed a template for his site using Hello. It worked like a charm.

So, what more does Google have now? Image manager, image catalogue searching, instant messenger, photo sharing application from this single deal. Awesome!