Picasa Web Albums, Google's image sharing service, has added advanced options for searching, making it easier to find just the size and orientation of photo you want, as well as opening the doors to commercial use and remixes.

Sometimes you like a photo so much, you want to post it to Facebook, Flickr, and all your other Web 2.0-type identities. Media sharing web app Oosah (a strong contestant for weirdest web app name so far) has opened up a new feature that makes trading a digital photo or other media files between Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, and other social sites pretty easy. After signing up and confirming logins, you can simply upload to Oosah or drag a file from one web app to the other, saving you the time of multiple uploads. If you're going to spend valuable work time sharing your latest photo journey, you may as well hit at as many outlets at once as possible. Oosah is free to use, requires a sign-up to activate. Oosah

Windows/Mac/Linux (All Systems): One fine day in the future, Google will release a Picasa client for Mac OS X, making it possible for anyone to upload or download a Picasa Web Album from any system. Until then, tools like Bradley Beach's PicasaWebalbumsAssistant will help a great deal. Beach's Java-based tool lets ou grab either public albums by entering a username, or private albums from an emailed invitation link. Better still, it offers thumbnail previews of the album you're about to download, and you can skip shots you don't need. Combined with the previously-posted, OS X-only Picasa Web Albums Uploader and Exporter (original post), Mac users can easily use Picasa's web features without a long series of file choosing and uploads. PicasaWebalbumsAssistant is a free download that works with any system running Java 5.5 or higher. Picasa Webalbums Assistant

Windows/Mac/Linux with Adobe AIR: Keep updates on all your friends' social network activities with Alert Thingy, an application for Adobe's AIR platform that brings FriendFeed functionality to the desktop. We've shown that social aggregator site FriendFeed can make it faster and easier to keep tabs on friends, and while you could track those updates with a private RSS feed, Alert Thingy lets you keep it in an buddy-list-like window, available for quick browsing and, best of all, searching. If you can't keep yourself from digging through your various social memberships to see what's new, Alert Thingy might at least make it quicker to do so. Alert Thingy is a free download for Adobe's AIR platform, which runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.