I got an invite, downloaded a new version of Picasa 2 Beta, and published some photos.
Seems to work very well so far, check it out at http://picasaweb.google.com/h0bbel. I've put some new Picasa 2 Beta screenshots up in my Gallery install too.
It looks pretty much the same as the old Picasa 2 application,. but has a few new tricks up it's sleeve:
The web application is the slick, nearly minimalistic look you come to expect from Google. So far it's very responsive and the performance seems great. The ability to download an album directly into Picasa 2 from someone who has shared their photos seems like a good idea. You get 250MB storage space for free, and can purchase 6 gigabytes of additional storage for $25 a year.
In my test I uploaded one pure jpg, one Canon RAW .cr2 file and one jpg with Picasa 2 tags in it. I can't seem to find the tags in the Web interface though, but I'm sure that will come.
RSS feeds
Looks like this could become a real flickr contender. Lets hope it stays as snappy as it is now though, and don't get bogged down and sluggish like flickr is.
Now, who's going to create a Gallery 2 module that deals with Picasa Web Albums? Perhaps a RSS module for Gallery 2 could read albums from Picasa Web albums and display photos stored there as items in a Gallery 2 album? At least that sounds possible now, until Google (hopefully) releases an API that can be accessed directly.