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Follow up on Picnik party last night

So it was great to see some familiar faces at the Picnik party last night. The crew has done an amazing job executing on this thing. I’d go so far as to say that it is one of the most polished web apps I’ve ever seen. If they weren’t so busy with Picnik they could probably make a fortune hosting their own brand of rich media development conferences.

The Picnik premise is pretty straightforward. The system provides the most comprehensive way to get creative with your images short of using a big desktop app like Photoshop. Now, I’m quite certain that the Picnik guys would never argue this is a Photoshop competitor and that’s good because we all know that Photoshop a sledge hammer when you sometimes just want a ball peen. It is, quite simply, the best web-based image manipulator ever developed. It is also one of the best flash applications ever developed. The system lets you import and edit photos from almost any location they may live…from your own file system to flickr and facebook. The newly launched Premium version gives you a wickedly fast and easy way to add cool image effects, type and blemish correction. This application is fast, powerful and sure to get even more popular than it is already. The flash implementation proves that Ajax isn’t the best approach for every problem. One could debate market size and revenue potential all day long for a product like this. But my position is that people will come to rely on Picnik in great enough numbers such that the founders will do just fine on this project and they will have had a great deal of fun along the way.

Picnik main page

Picnik image import

Picnik editing

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