On May 15th, Hello, the picture sharing tool from Google (which was part of the Picasa acquisition) will be shut down. This piece of software was ahead of its time when it first launched, providing what probably was the best way of sharing pictures between friends in real time. Its specialized functionality will however turn out to be the cause of its own demise -- it never reached a wider audience (my short friends list below being an evidence of it) because it didn't quite fit the taste of most IM users. However, the functionality that Hello was offering could have been an excellent feature of a full-pledged IM client. (Yahoo eventually implemented something similar)It's barely 4 days to go before the servers of Hello are turned off, so for the next few days I'll be online on Hello and will probably be playing with the software a few more times before it goes away for good (paging anyone). If you want to try Hello, it can still be download at http://updates.picasa.com/hello/651/Hello651.exe You have to have a Picasa account though (your Google/Picasaweb account won't work). My handle on Hello is (surprise surprise) emelgeek. Want to play with Hello too? Add me.