Hello In Its Last Days

"Hello will be shut down on May 15th," admits a message on Hello.com.  It continues, "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."

It looks like Google isn’t fully retiring from photo sharing, then, and with any luck, no layoffs are taking place.  Perhaps Hello wasn’t too profitable, or maybe Google has something else in mind for the domain name.

One possibility: Hello.com would be perfect for the GrandCentral phone service.  Some social project might work, too (and Google’s shown all sorts of interest in them lately).  Google just needs to remain of the irony that’s evident when things named "Hello" fail.

It looks like we’re stuck with another one of those "time will tell" situations.  Anyway, a hat tip for the current story goes to Philipp Lenssen.

Google is shutting down Hello, Picasa’s photo sharing service which was part of the Picasa acquisition back in 2004. On the program, Wikipedia writes:

Hello by Google’s Picasa is [was] a free computer program that allows users to send images across the Internet and publish them to their blogs. It is similar to an instant messaging program because one can send text, but Hello focuses on digital photographs.

I made a copy of Hello’s old homepage and their “how it works” page* as the site is now just displaying the following message:

All good things come to an end. So it is with sadness that we say goodbye to Hello.

Hello will be shut down on May 15th.

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.

Wonder what Google aims to do with this neat domain name now?

Comments