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According to the latest data from HitWise, Photobucket, the leading photo sharing site in the United States, saw a rapid decline in its market share over the last twelve months. Photobucket commanded 36% of the photo sharing market in February 2008, but this number dropped to 27% last month. Most of this loss, according to Hitwise, can be attributed to a decline in visits to MySpace, which has always been the main source of traffic for Photobucket.

Google's Picasa team released a number of major updates to both its desktop photo managing application Picasa and its online photo gallery this week. On Tuesday, we already reported about the addition of face recognition to the Picasa web albums, but Google also added Creative Comments licenses and email uploads, while the desktop application now lets you create collages, retouch photos, add text to your images, and upload your videos to YouTube.

According to a report on CNet, the next version of Google's Picasa Web Albums will go live at noon PST today. The central new feature of this version will be automated face recognition and tagging. In tandem with this update, Google will also launch a new version of Picasa, its desktop photo management software, which will also get a number of new features, including a movie maker mode, a retouch brush, and online synchronization with Picasa Web Albums.

Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped noticed today that Google announced that it will be shuttering its Hello photo sharing and chat application next week. Hello was an instant messenger-like desktop photo sharing application that made it easy to send photos to friends via an encrypted connection. The Hello.com web page has been replaced by a shut down notice and the service will cease to work on May 15th.

Are you into multimedia? Do you stream music over the web, share photos on Flickr and Picassa, watch videos at YouTube, share links with friends, and hang out in social networks? A new startup from Ubuket wants to help make access to your content from anywhere even easier. The service they provide will let you access all your media from your desktop, social network, blog, or even your mobile device.