Google has acquired Picnik, the Seattle-based photo-editing app that lives in the cloud. I always sort of thought of Picnik as Photoshop Elements that I could access from anywhere.

I’m a bit surprised by this news, as I feel like I’ve seen Picnik everywhere in the last year, including BlogHer and CES. In fact, one of those recyclable shopping bags with a big Picnik logo is sitting right next to me.

My first thought when I heard Picnik was acquired by Google was, “What about Yahoo?”  Picnik is integrated into Yahoo’s Flickr photo-sharing app, where it offers online photo editing inside the Flickr wrapper. I use it all the time, actually. So this is interesting cross-contamination between Google and Yahoo. Obviously Google is hoping to really ramp up Picasa, and as Picasa shares so seamlessly with the other Google tools, this makes sense. If everyone I know (and several years worth of photos) wasn’t already on Flickr, I’d probably move to Picasa.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the Picnik blog post on the matter sounds more happy than sad.

What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so stay tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on.

The Official Google blog also reiterates that nothing is changing. In particular, they address the Yahoo/Flickr question without mentioning it by name, saying that they’ll support “all existing Picnik partners.”

We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features. As well, we’d like to continue supporting all existing Picnik partners so that users will continue to be able to add their photos from other photo sharing sites, make edits in the cloud and then save and share to all relevant networks.

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Cheers!
Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

As a blogger, I use Flickr a lot to find relevant images that correctly portray what I’m trying to express in my words. That means I’m often mired in Flickr search. Yesterday, the Flickr blog announced a redesign of their search page.

The page now allows you to search based on keyword through the individual images/videos, as well as search for groups and people. As always, you can search through the entire text associated with an image or just the tags. You can also change the view from Small and Medium (Small is shown in the screenshot) to Detailed view, which is similar to the old Flickr search results. Small view resembles CompFight, which I occasionally use to search for Creative Commons-licensed photos. In Small and Medium view, every photo has an i button in the lower right corner. Clicking the i provides a pop-up with detailed information, such as date, location, and number of comments.

The right-hand column now provides a new perspective as well.

On the right side of the page we try to provide a new perspective on your search. Based upon how our members are tagging their photos and participating in the Flickrverse, you’ll see links to the groups, photographers, tag clusters and places that are most closely related what you’re looking for. We hope these will occasionally provide a little extra inspiration for your search.

My only complaint is that there is no easy way to search Creative Commons-licensed photos. You still need to go into Advanced search, click the appropriate checkboxes, and then Search again. I’d love it if Flickr would add a CC button to the main search page.

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Cheers!

Tweet Michelle @writetechnology, send her technology news at michelle[at]writetech[dot]net, visit her wine blog when you’re thirsty, and drop by her day job.

by Brian Solis

Flickr has finally joined the party for seamlessly connecting and sharing pictures directly to Twitter. Up until now, Twitpic and yfrog have dominated the Twitter stream for pictures, simply because they provided a tremendously easy system for snapping and uploading pictures to Twitter from mobile devices.

While I’m an avid photographer, I am not however, an avid camera-phone shutterbug. Up until recently, if I were so inclined to proactively share an image from my Flickr Pro account, I would do so manually. However, an age-old feature within Flickr has finally received a long overdue update, the ability to not only “blog this” image, but also “tweet it.”

Now, simply clicking on the “blog this” button above the image, you can now connect your Twitter account in addition to your blog. In doing so, it takes you to another window where you have roughly 120 characters remaining to frame the tweet. Flickr automatically provides a shortened “flic.kr” URL and embedds it into your Tweet to save time and effort.

To append your Flickr account with your Twitter credentials, click here.

Connect with me on:
Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Plaxo, Plurk, Identi.ca, BackType, or Facebook

Read more from Brian Solis:

Blog: PR 2.0
Book: Putting the Public Back in Public Relations
Social Map: The Conversation Prism

by Michelle Lentz

If you’re not familiar, Eye-Fi offers memory cards that upload your photos directly to the Internet via a Wi-Fi connection. According to a post on VentureBeat this morning, they’ve now launched the Eye-Fi Pro.

The Eye-Fi Pro is aimed at professional photographers and serious enthusiasts. It’s a 4 GB file and it supports JPG, various video, and the format that will make many people happy – RAW.  New options include geo-tagging photos, uploading via Peer-to-Peer (no router needed), and easier access to Wi-Fi hotspots. There is also Selective Transfer to choose which photos will be automatically updated. Nikon and Casio are offering Eye-Fi connected cameras as well.

Eye-Fi connects to 25 online sharing sites, including Flickr, and costs around $149.

Hmm … maybe I need one of these to take to Alaska with me.

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by Brian Solis

Happy New Year!

Comscore released its list revealing the top Social Networks and Social Media properties for 2008 (note, these numbers to not include December traffic). Google’s Blogger.com blogging platform is clearly dominating, however Facebook continues its meteoric rise and appears on track to imminently earn the number one spot. Myspace appears to have leveled off a bit, but is still in third place. WordPress comes in at a close fourth, demonstrating the continued growth of its blogging network. Windows Lvie Spaces and Yahoo! Geocities trail in a distant fifth and sixth place, however, Flickr shows a strong position at number seven. Scribd deserves a mention as it continues to grow as a premier social network for the sharing and discovery of documents.

Total Unique Visitors (000) as of November 2008

1. Blogger – 221,503

2. Facebook – 200,189

3. MySpace – 126,168

4. WordPress – 113,661

5. Windows Live Spaces – 86,760

6. Yahoo! Geocities – 69,159

7. Flickr – 63,866

8. Hi5 – 58,069

9. Orkut – 46,446

10. Six Apart Sites – 45,606

11. Baidu Space – 40,276

12. Friendster – 31,325

13. 56.com – 29,171

14. Webs.com – 24,230

15. Bebo – 24,149

16. Scribd – 23,524

17. Lycos Tripod – 23,350

18. Tagged.com – 22,300

19. Imeem – 21,889

20. Netlog.com – 21,1777

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by Brian Solis

Originally published at PR 2.0.

I’ve invested a significant portion of time and energy into the support, development, and refinement of an ambitious project led by Jodee Rich. I did so, because I believe that it is one of the most compelling and promising services for uniting our distributed social presence and the relationships that make us stronger – personally and professionally.

Introducing PeopleBrowsr, an attention-centered dashboard for managing your online relationships and communication in Twitter and across multiple social networks.

It made its public debut in Alpha this past Friday, which means that it is still in an early, but a highly functional, stage of development. The only way to improve it is to let real people have access to it, without restrictions.

PeopleBrowsr offers a vast breadth of features and functionality. If you’re a Social Media power user or a brand manager, this is a wish come true.

At its foundation, PeopleBrowsr is a first of a kind meta-network for social networks that works with Mozilla FireFox 3, Safari 3.1 or Google Chrome – no download or plug-in required. It essentially turns your Web browser into a simple, visual social media dashboard. While there are many third-party tools for Twitter, PeopleBrowsr brings the best features from all of the popular add-on services into one solution – without requiring a download or a browser plug-in.

It combines your profiles and your connections across multiple social networks into one, easy to manage place, including, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, Upcoming, among others. You can mix views to include activity from all or selected networks simultaneously, individually, and also communicate with your contacts across networks, from one place.

Mixing your view and interaction.

As an introduction to the service, we’ll start with Twitter.

Anyone familiar with TweetDeck will enjoy an instant familiarity with the friendly interface. But that’s where the similarity stops and the unique benefits emerge.

PeopleBrowsr supercharges Twitter.

With one simple to use browser-based hub, everyone can view, group, and communicate with friends, and friends of friends, in and across all of the popular networks. You can update status, view posts, connect with contacts, make new friends, and share content within and between networks.

At first sight, PeopleBrowsr provides either a columnar view (The PostStack) or a “people” grid gallery of organizable tweets from “everyone” in the Twitter stream with additional distinct columns for “following” and replies. Additional stream options feature the ability to view direct messages and other standard views into dedicated, scrolling columns. PeopleBrowsr also provides integrated search functionality of Twitter directly within streams, displaying results in new stream columns. And, if you want to focus on key regions, you can also run hyper local searches to see who’s tweeting in a certain city. Searches can be additive for further refining of streams.

But wait, there’s more…

With PeopleBrowsr, you can monitor brands, engage with communities, and improve communications with friends through a myriad of unique features that include, the ability for power users to easily build and communicate specifically with dedicated tag-formed groups; scheduling tweet posting at a later time; and also network-wide, wiki-style tagging of people for grouping, categorization, and also searching.

Most importantly, PeopleBrowsr introduces the foundation for the very first address book for Twitter.

Take a deep breath, PeopleBrowsr is much more than a dashboard for Twitter, it’s a social network for all social networks.

Today, many people participate in multiple online social networks. From Twitter to FriendFeed, LinkedIn to Facebook, and Youtube to Flickr, the attention of today’s online enthusiasts is thinning and distributed. While the alpha version of PeopleBrowsr focuses initially on empowering the Twitter community, the service actually unites Social Media and the Social Web.

PeopleBrowsr empowers power users and “the rest of us” alike to concentrate energy in one place instead of wrestling with a distributed presence. You no longer have to open different tools and browser tabs to log in and connect with people through disparate services. As a single social media dashboard, PeopleBrowsr allows anyone to manage all of their personal network profiles. It simplifies communication and relationship building with friends and like-minded individuals – regardless of social media network.

PeopleBrowsr also introduces PeopleBrowsr IDs (PBIDs), a new genre of intelligent social media profiles for those looking to learn more about interesting people. These rich IDs offer an instant and highly detailed overview of an individual’s presence across the social Web by automatically aggregating their other network profiles and blogs as a social graph. You can also can share what you know about each individual for others to see using PeopleProfiles.

The team is reading Tweets and implementing fixes, fine-tuning the product, and integrating new features ahead of the beta release due out at the beginning of the new year. “Live” Tweets from the community are being used to build a new product in real time. They’re listening!

At the very least, I hope PeopleBrowsr offers a refreshing and helpful alternative to centralize your online presence and the relationships that define who you are today and tomorrow.

Please spread the word…

I also wanted to send a special thank you to each and everyone who took the time to meet with Jodee and me to share their initial reaction and feedback to help us get to where we are today.

Thank you.

Ariel Waldman
Cal Hendrickson
Cathy Brooks
Chris Saad
Christopher Golda
Dave Mathews
Frank Gruber
Guy Kawasaki
Jason Kincaid
Jeremiah Owyang
Jodee Rich
Justin Kan
Laura Fitton (Pistachio)
Loic Le Meur
Louis Gray
Marissa Louie
Mike McGrath
Robert Scoble
Sarah Lacy
Tara Hunt
Tim Ferriss
Tim O’Reilly

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by Michelle Lentz

Thanks to Brian’s own Twitter feed, I’ve discovered that its possible to make Twitter backgrounds with Powerpoint or Keynote. You don’t have to rely on Twitter’s own backgrounds or your lacking graphic design skills.

One of Brian’s tweets led me to Thomas Carillo’s The Closet Entrepreneur, where we’re offered Keynote and Powerpoint templates for Twitter backgrounds. Cool, yes?

I think the Twitter background is a pretty underrated thing. It’s a great way to advertise yourself and your personal (or professional) brand in graphics and using more than 140 characters if you want. I’ve seen some rather kick-ass Twitter backgrounds. It’s nice to know there’s a template out there that helps me create a more professional appearance without my having to actually know the pixel sizes for the various columns and rows.

Thomas also points us to the Extended Twitter background collection on Flickr, which is impressive on its own and may serve to inspire you.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email at michelle[at]writetech.net, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.

by Michelle Lentz

PhotoJoy is a free application that lets you easily create all sorts of toys with your photos. You can create desktop widgets (toys), 3D photo screensavers, wallpaper collages.

Their theory is that we take the photos, store them in an archive somewhere or upload them to Flickr, and then never look at them. Photojoy figures you should, well, enjoy them.

Uploading your photos to PhotoJoy quick and simple, and it even works with your Flickr account. You can choose to upload photos saved on your computer or any photos from your Flickr account. In addition, PhotoJoy also offers a Web streaming option that automatically updates your PhotoToys, screensavers and wallpaper collages with new photos from Flickr as soon as they become available.

Did I mention the software was free? For an example of what you can do with PhotoJoy, here’s a great video they made featuring our own Brian Solis. And Brian, this is exactly what you get for having your photos all over the Internet.

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Contact Michelle with your news, apps, and events via email, Twitter, Pownce, or FriendFeed. Visit Michelle at Wine-Girl.net and Write Technology.