In anther example of Google's recent rapid-fire product releases, this week has seen the limited-release of Picasa, Google's photo software that it acquired in 2004. To this point, Picasa was a great locally-installed photo browsing and editing program that was super-smooth and easy to use. However, its integration with anything online -- including Google's blogger.com blog service -- was anything but spectacular. All that changed with this week's release of the new Picasa software, which features very easy integration with a new -- and free -- online web album provided by Google. The address of such an album would be picasaweb.google.com/username.

What is Google planning here? An assault on Yahoo!'s enormously-popular Flickr photo-sharing service? Absolutely, and having already looked at the new Picasa online photo album integration -- visit picasaweb.google.com to sign up for an invite -- it's pretty slick and should give Flickr a run for the money. Google gives Picasa web users 250MB of free storage space -- much more than Flickr -- and Flickr.com may respond by bumping up its free online storage space, similar to what Yahoo! Mail did when Google's Gmail came to town with a free 1GB of email storage two years ago.

Why did I highlight "should" in the preceeding paragraph, you ask? Well, as with any first-mover advantage, Flickr.com has been in the online photo-sharing space for almost two years now and is probably the most popular such site right now. Google's new Picasa looks be to quite a competitor (with even high-resolution available). Convincing online photo sharers to leave Flickr.com and get new customers to use the servic, will be Google's challenge. 

In fact, there are many superior Google services such as Gmail and Google Calendar. But Google's challenge is to build the audience.  As a GOOG investor, it's appropriate to wonder how Google plans to build audiences for all these neat and new products. If there is a strategy at work, mum's the word in the Googleplex.