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][1] 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 online 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][2]. There's even a nice [hello world example][3] to get you started.

[1]: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/05/oh-places-youll-go.html "Oh, the places you'll go...."
[2]: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/index.html "AJAX Slide Show"
[3]: http://www.google.com/uds/solutions/slideshow/reference.html#hello-world "Slideshow Hello World"