Picasa 2.0 released

Probably the most significant ray of hope and light that I have seen in a long time from my trusted partner in blogging - Google. They finally managed to put out a new release of the free Picasa photo tool that I use to output my web pages of photos for my blog and web site. I can't wait to download Picasa 2 tonight and test it out all night long to see what new things I can do with the indexing and web output of my photo albums. I am hoping for the best and pretty darned excited about this new release. It also gives me hope that Blogger may finally add some new features if I wait her in feature limbo for long enough... features like utilities to display next and previous, blogrolling stuff, etc. I am confident it will all work out for the best.

I have a little theory about why these releases are planned as they are over at Google. They are spreading updates to their desktop software packages and non-search utilities to maximize PR coverage. By putting out one release at a time they can focus their PR efforts and search traffic generation to make the launch successful and avoid having too many items to promote at once. Thus they can't promote blogger updates until after they have milked the Picasa upgrade which they didn't hype until the Google Desktop Search beta was starting to lose steam as news.