Picasa Debuts Lackluster Slideshow Feature
Picasa Web Albums, the photo sharing site from Google, has released a new Flash-based slideshow feature. The slideshows can be embedded in nearly any page, making it easy to share them with friends.
Unfortunately the new slideshows are lackluster at best — small and a bit ugly. A giant Picasa logo in the lower right corner will obscure a good sized portion of your image and make the entire thing seem more like a viral ad campaign than a feature.
There’s no impressive new features or functionality compared to competing offerings and frankly at least half a dozen other web services already offer similar services that look considerably better.
Of course if you’re a Picasa user the new slideshows, while far from perfect, are pretty much the only easy option.
If you happen to know a bit of Javascript though, you’d probably be better off creating one of the nice Ajax-based slideshows courtesy of the Google Ajax Feed API. There’s even a nice hello world example to get you started.
