Google has shut down Hello, the instant messenger-styled desktop photo sharing app that enabled one to send photos to friends, thru’ Picassa integration.
As far as my experience with Hello is concerned, I never used the service (even though I use Picassa) – it was a small feature in the entire product and somehow lost it’s identity over a period of time.
What’s really commendable is Google’s decision – how many companies have the ba**s to take quick decisions on services that are not getting enough traction?
Very few.
Apart from political battles (within the team), there are lots of other issues involved while sunsetting a product – for e.g. what about users who are using the product? Whom do you migrate them to? What about pilferage? etc.
Bye Bye Hello. You won’t be missed!
That’s true.. Hello wont be missed.. the one or two times I tried using it 3-4 years back, it didnt work. And then along came flickr.
I thought it was a very useful product and Hello will be missed! I hope to find a replacement soon?? I work with a studio photographer thats located in another state and Hello was a perfect solution to exchange full res images at fast speeds. Before Hello, you had to either upload via FTP, or a few at a time on a web host service. But both were slow and offered no real-time input and colaboration, especially before full images are uploaded or exchanged? A perfect feature I though Hello had cornered! The ability to upoad a full folder worth of images was also a bonus. Will be missed for sure!
Corey – You have brought in very interesting use case and am sure Hello served your purpose a lot – yes, it was a nice tool, but somehow got obscured under heavy weight features in Picasa.
Hello was a wonderful simple to use tool which did the job very well. It was much underrated and with no other software that comes close it will be missed for sure…think again GOOGLE
google ,not to sound condasending ,however. have we forgotten the act of giving back to thoes who are the reason you have sucess at all,(your users). rest in prosparity.hello!
Will Surely be missed. Was such a wonderful tool to share photos in real time, scrolling back and forward and comment on each photo. No other software comes even close to those functionality.
Also some other trivial ones .. like the icons falling from the screen..
Google listen… PLeasssssse… Give it back.
I live in Australia have friends and family in Europe and it was the only program where we could share all our photos and instantly discuss them at the same time, we are all very sad about losing Hello and hope it comes back in some form or another its photo sharing capabilities were second to none. We miss it and look out everyday for news of a replacement.
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