My dad has been experimenting with Hello, software that allows you to share your digital photo, and Picassa, software which allows you to find, edit and organize digital photos that reside on your hardrive. These software downloads are part of Google's positioning to take over the desktop from Microsoft.

I have played around with Picassa and have found it very user friendly and intuitive. I think they have found a niche that needed to be filled. As an example, my dad is one of the most knowlegeable computer uses in the 80+ year old category and has been using computers back to the first macintosh that my sisters and I purchased for him in the late 1980s. However, something that has always been confusing for him is the ability to navigate the Explorer features, how to (and where to) save documents, files and now digital photos. Picassa brings to him the ability to have the software find and organize the photos on his hard drive.

He has been using Picassa for a couple of months and just recently sent me an invitation to join Hello so that we can share digital photos back and forth. I have been meaning to download and try out Hello, since I was interested in the feature that allows me to now share photos up to my Blogger blog (Blogger is another product/business swept up by Google). Above is a test post of a photo of my 9 month old during a recent trip to Florida with her, my wife and my 4 year old.