Google buys Picnik
Google announced last week that it has purchased Picnik, creators of an impressive in-browser photo editing webapp.
Flickr users will probably be familiar with Picnik, which is an embedded function for paying users of the photo sharing site.
Using Picnik inside Flickr is a delight. Although it can take quite a while (about 30 seconds in my experience) to get the Picnik code loaded, once that’s done the experience is smooth and very easy. Having uploaded an image and spotted a problem with it, it’s much easier to edit it inside Picnik, and save the new version over the old one, than it is to do those edits locally and upload a new image to Flickr.
Wait, though – Google’s a search company. What does it want with Picnik?
In its blog post, the company said: “We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features.”
The keyword there is integration. Google is slowly bringing lots of its webapps together. Buzz is a subset of Wave features, and has been tied closely to Gmail. Google Calendar, Docs, and Reader are all meshed together. Lots of Google services (like Blogger and Google Sites) use Picasa as an image storage bucket. Thousands of Google users probably have Picasa web albums and they don’t even realise it.
Adding Picnik to the mix gives Google another ingredient for its web-based software empire. The web desktop is looming ever closer, and Google wants to be able to offer people as much of the local desktop computing experience as possible – and that includes image editing.
