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News & ArtsMonday, March 1, 2010
Tech / Teh Internets Seattle-Based Picnik Snapped Up by Google
Posted by Matt Hickey on Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 2:12 PM
- My pooch, Dogboy, in Picnik's editing interface
The purchase means "we can think BIG," company officials write on their blog. Picnik, which claims millions of hits a month, adds, "Google processes petabytes of data every day ... Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before."
Picnik's flagship product is a photo editor which works sort of like an online version of Apple's iPhoto. It's not meant to replace apps like Photoshop, but it's become a popular choice for simple photo touch ups with people who use Facebook, and is the default image editor for Flickr, owned by Google's competitor Yahoo!. As Picnik also works with Google's Picasa photo service, which seems the likely reason for the purchase, it'll be interesting to see if Google keeps the ability to interact with its competitor's services.
One interesting point is that Picnik uses Flash as its main interface. For the most part, Google uses standard Web languages AJAX for most of its tools. If Google decides to transition the software over that could mean extra work in the area. Right now, Picnik has just 20 employees, but that could grow if Google decides Flash isn't the way it wants to edit its photos, or if it has other plans for the service we can't anticipate yet.
The financial terms of the deal are unknown at this time, but based on how fast buzz about the company has been spreading, you shouldn't be surprised to see a handful of new Maseratis tooling around town.
Ohhhhh if you want to make a possessive, it's just I-T-S
But if it's supposed to be a contraction then it's I-T-apostrophe-S
Scalawag
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Seems like it would take a year or more to grow the booshy mustache you need to drive one of those. And it's kind of unfair to be calling the Picnik founders a bunch of recently-divorced bald guys with a daughter in college unless you know for sure.
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But I can see Google rewriting this product, just for code management purposes.
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Yes, Flash will be gone by the end of the decade. That's TEN YEARS FROM NOW. The most important Flash application, YouTube, has barely been around for half that long. Lots of things "won't last out this decade".
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The main problem is that the purpose and niche it filled is already shifting, and the peak is observable already.
You forget, @10, that you're confusing a Service (e.g. video snippets in a displayable format on many devices) with a mechanism to deliver that. The form is meaningless, not the desire for the service.
still dead. film at 10:30 in Newfoundland.
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