Google has acquired Picnik — the popular online photo editor that has been steadily gaining the attention of the masses. Google’s reason for this acquisition is as obvious as ever. They are slowly building up their arsenal of online services and web apps as they inch closed to their Chrome OS launch. Even without the OS, they are constantly trying out new ways to do traditional computing works via the browser.
Picnik is one of the many such photo editing online apps that can be found on the web at the moment but it is undoubtedly one of the better ones. Picnik is not meant to replace PhotoShop and it doesn’t even attempt to do that. Instead it gives you a set of basic tools and effects that you can use no matter where you are or what kind of a system you are on. As long as you are online, you can edit and add effects to your photos.
It essentially does what photoshop online does in a way but it was there way before Adobe started the cloud based PhotoShop service. Google is saying that they do not intend to make any significant changes to the web app and hence it will remain as it is. Picnik also has third-party ties and Google reassures that these will be respected and supported so that Picnik users can continue to use the service as before.
These ties are mainly so that Picnik users can pull content from various places and share their work online amongst various networks.
Google is currently only saying that they are really excited to welcome the Picnik team onboard and that that they are really impressed with what Picnik has achieved so far. No plans for the future have been unveiled. But we don’t need an official announcement to get the obvious — they obviously intend to expand the Picasa service and add an editor to the online photo management and sharing app.
Google has been trying very hard to start up a line of services and web apps that will give them the edge over other popular networks such as Facebook and Flickr. But so far they have mostly been unsuccessful. Even their recent micro blogging/sharing service ‘Buzz’ has met with a very lukewarm response thus far. Google is yet to get the social formula just right and all the great ideas seem to be taken right now (Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, Flickr, etc.)
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