Have you ever looked at your Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) Flickr account and thought, "Why am I doing this? I can just throw my pics up on Facebook"? If this has crossed your mind, you're not alone. In fact, many photo-sharing sites – Snapfish (NYSE: HPQ), Photobucket, Picasa (NASDAQ: GOOG) and Shutterfly, as well as Flickr – are asking the same questions. With the development and enhancement of photo management capabilities in major social networking websites, niche players need to find new ways to stay relevant.

The situation is still far from grim. Fed by traffic from their behemoth owners, the photo-sharing sites remain substantial forces, and they are currently home to more than 20 billion pictures. There's still plenty of interest in these environments ... which has been bolstered by specific features that make the likes of Flickr attractive to both professional photographers and amateur shooters. The ability to order prints and personalize portfolios, for example, still provides an edge over sites like Facebook and MySpace (NYSE: NEWS).

Nonetheless, the threats from the social networking space are quite real.

Google shares closed down a bit today again to end the trading day at $385.80, a decline of $1.92 or 0.50% from Wednesday's close. With Google about to celebrate its second birthday as a public company this weekend, I posted some musings on this very subject here today.

After looking at all the accomplishments Google has made in those two years -- and where it stacks up financially against the competition -- Google is one strange and beautiful breed, that is for certain. But, is GOOG valued appropriately at over $380 per share?

Google appears to be joining into partnerships with some very powerful friends in this day and age, and is even striking a pact with CDC Corp., the Chinese online company.

Looks like the tentacles that are Google are multiplying and infiltrating all kinds of areas -- and this is a good thing for Google. Just how far it can go, though, is still a mystery.

Brian White has worked in various executive positions in technology and telecommunications and now focuses on editing and writing.

Microsoft agreed to purchase iView Multimedia. In fact, iView's founder, Yan Calotychos, wrote an open letter about the deal (no terms were announced).

Basically, iView has technology that manages digital photos – and has a loyal following among photographers and graphic artists. No doubt, they need to do things like store, share and annotate extensive libraries of photos. And, for Apple fans, iView will continue to support the Mac product line.

Digital photography is becoming pervasive. So far, Apple's iLife has done quite well. There is also a new product offerings from Adobe and Google (ie, Picasa). True, Microsoft is late to the game. But, then again, with a pile of money in the bank, it can wait around – and just buy the market if it needs to.

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.

So, in addition to launching Google Spreadsheet this week, is Google readying another industry assault with its Picasa photo-editing and sharing program? Doubtful, as it has a long ways to go to catch Flickr, recently acquired by competitor Yahoo!. Flickr, in my opinion, is the epitome of a good, web-based shared photo application. Photos can be tagged for easy search and retrieval, and the site is clean and uncluttered -- making it easy to use even to the novice.

On the flip side (somewhat), Google's Picasa is a local-based application that is also just as easy to use and features a slick, easy-to-use interface that makes most other photo-editing programs looks incredible complicated by comparison. But, it's not really web-based (beyond the integration with Google's www.blogger.com), and it's not really a direct competitor to Flickr.