Finally Friday, and finally time to release what we’ve been working on for the past few weeks. (I’ve fought hard to haved named “The Four S’es — Search, Slideshow, Stories and deSign”). At the core, there’s really nothing new to this since 23 sported all of the S’es before, but there’s always room for improvement, and we’ve wanted to give all of these sections a bit of extra attention.

Searching has been supercharged: The interface is faster, cleaner and much more intuitive, and we’ve added filtering and some other niceties to make sure that you can find the photos you’re looking for at 23. Included in the package: Easy searching of individual users and searching in your contacts’ photos.

We’ve gone iPhoto on the slidehows: They are now shown in the full browser window and are faded and moved to make for a pleasurable viewing of full-size photos. Included in the package: One-click slideshowing from pretty much anywhere at 23.

Stories is one of our unique features, which has already found a user base. Now, you can select photo size and alignment, and the editing UI has been updated to provide a what-you-see-is-what-you-get feel. Included in the package: Extended support for blogging stories, and animated sorting of photos within the story.

And then there’s the big one: The new and improved design. There’s much to tell you about this, and a lot of nice new finishes is included in this part of the package — but it’s much easier if you’d just jump to 23 instead.

(And, as you’ll see from the screenshot, we’ve also added Russian — which is two S’es in it’s own right — to our list of supported languages. Thanks, lormus!)

Take me to 23 in Russian now