In my last post I mentioned that we had a way to clear your Flickr or Picasa setting via the account settings but there was a better solution in the works. It would appear that I wasn’t paying attention! The better solution was actually part of the last release. When you’re using the Flickr or Picasa tabs in Picnik, look in the top left corner you’ll see a new “options” drop-down right under your name. Click on that and you’ll see a “Disconnect” option that will reset your Flickr or Picasa settings in Picnik. This has absolutlely no effect on your Flickr or Picasa accounts. The “Disconnect” function just instructs Picnik to forget about your Flickr or Picasa authentication information. You can reconnect by clicking on the big “Authorize” button.

You can use this feature to move between two different Flickr or Picasa accounts. There really isn’t a reason for 99.99% of our users to use the disconnect feature because your authentication information is securely stored away on the Picnik server. If you’re concerned that someone might access your various accounts via Picnik, be sure to click on the “Sign Out” button in the upper right hand corner when you’re done, especially if you’re on a public computer.

If you had trouble getting to the site this morning, our DNS provider, moniker.com, went down for at least a couple of hours today. We’ll be eliminating that single point of failure ASAP! Sorry for any inconvienence.

Other than the hiccup with our DNS provider, things are really great. There was a nice write up of Picnik (and four other products) in Extreme Tech yesterday. Both Slashdot and Digg picked it up.

We also released a small update this week with the final piece of Picasa Web Albums authentication. We now use fully signed reqests when sending requests to Google. Frankly, you won’t noticed any difference at all, except that now the Google authentication page no longer has that nasty warning about not knowing who we are. Now they know that we’re one of the good guys and they even have our logo on the auth page. We also added a way to clear your Flickr and Picasa credentials from your account on the account settings page. This was a quick and dirty page, we’re working on a nicer account management system in the near future.

Keep that feedback coming. Enjoy!

By very popular request, we’re pleased to bring you the Picnik Bookmarklet. This is a fast and easy way to get images from any website into Picnik in just one click. Here’s how to install it on Firefox, Safari, and Explorer:

Firefox:
Drag and drop this button to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

Safari:
Drag and drop this slightly sexier looking button to your Bookmarks Bar.

Explorer:
Right-click on this button and choose “Add to Favorites…” (near the bottom of the menu). Hit Yes if a Security Alert dialog pops up (it’s safe, we promise), then Add the bookmarklet to your Links folder to have it appear in your Links bar.

Now, anytime you would like to edit an image from a website, just click the bookmarklet to launch Picnik and display that website’s images. Or, you can navigate directly to the image you would like to edit, then hit the bookmarklet. In this case, Picnik will automatically load the single image straight into Edit mode.

Enjoy!

I put together a Firefox extension to make it easier to pull pictures that you find on the web into Picnik. You can try it by clicking here. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Some of you Picasa Web users might notice that we’re making you reauthenticate. The reason for that is we have upgraded the security around logging into Picasa Web Albums. Now when you click on the “Authorize” button, you’ll get redirected to Google where you can authorize Picnik to access your Google Picasa Web Album data.

We’re also working on an updated user settings page that will allow you to clear your Picasa and Flickr information from your Picnik account. That will allow people with more than one Flickr or Picasa Web Album account to change which account Picnik is using.

Google is releasing the Picasa Web Album API today and I’m happy to announce that we already support it! We asked you to tell us which sites you’d like to see us tie into and Picasa Web was #1.

Please keep in mind that the paint is still fresh on both Google’s Picasa Web API and our use of it, so please let us know if you run into any problems.

Enjoy!

The new release is out. Get busy!

Thanks for the email, we’ve gotten several naming suggestions. We’ve been impressed with the quality of your suggestions. Keep them coming!

I’m sitting here amusing myself with the new version of Microsoft Office. I’m hardly a hard-core Office user but I thought I’d give the blog posting feature a bit of a try. For the most part, I really like it. I like what they’ve done to replace the menus. It is much easier to find commands  and settings. Posting to a blog is was handled very well. It worked the first time and the HTML was pretty clean. I’m not as pleased with Outlook or Vista, but I won’t go into that here…

Enough of that, let’s talk about Picnik. Here’s a glimpse into what the team is working on now:

The bitmap on the left is a little teaser for the next release. Brian and Peter have really done an awesome job on this. I knew they were working on some more creative tools, but we were all shocked when we saw what they had made – the creative tools are much more powerful and there were several new additions that were a total surprise. I’m not sure about a release date yet, but I’d expect it to be in the two week-ish time frame.

Darrin has been working on a couple of interesting things, including one of our most requested features – an API. I’ll wait until we’re closer to release before we go into any more detail on the API. We’ve had so many sites requesting this feature that we bumped it up in work list. You’re going to like what Darrin’s cooked up.

I’ve been working with Justin on some of the less visible features, like working on getting the server fully scalable for that day when we start getting oodles and oodles of traffic. We’re already in pretty decent shape, but we’ve been talking with a lot of potential partners who have the ability to send a huge amount of traffic our way. I’m working with Justin to ensure that between Apache, Cherrypy, mogileFS, MySQL, perlbal and a smattering of PHP and Perl so that we have the ability to scale quickly. So far, so good!

I would like to know what people are interested in reading about in this blog. We’re happy to share most anything. Please leave a comment or send me email with any requests.

One of the questions that we get accustomed to hearing is “what is your business model”? It’s an odd sort of thing to ask a business, but then again, web businesses are sort of odd. I take these questions as a good sign – people like what they see and they want to know that Picnik is going to be around for a long time. The answer, at least the short one, is that we plan on offering both free and pay versions of Picnik. Starting with the next release, you’ll see some features marked as — well, that’s our problem. We don’t know what to call the pay version. ‘Pro’ doesn’t seem to right, ‘Plus’ is better, but it doesn’t really grab me.

That’s where y’all come into the picture, or rather, the Picnik. We need your help. We don’t have the budget needed to hire some fancy naming agency to come up with something clever like “Essentials”. We’d love to hear your suggestions for a name for our pay version. It should convey the added value of the expanded feature set and it should be fun. And catchy. And bonus points for tying into our Picnik theme. The name should start with “Picnik” or at least contain “Picnik”.

What do you get in exchange for submitting the perfect name? In addition to our publicly recognizing your product naming prowess in this here blog, we’ll hang your likeness on our office wall and we’ll send you a wonderful, limited edition, designer series, Picnik t-shirt. And, if you’re local (Seattle), we’ll buy you lunch.

Send those great ideas to: contact at picnik.com.