Last night, Picnik passed the 100,000 user mark on Facebook! Proof!

Thanks to everyone for adding us and for all the great feedback! We’re stunned, thrilled, and downright giddy. Stay tuned as we work out kinks and come up with some great new Facebook features.

What a perfect weekend for a Picnik! I know, I know. I thought the same thing last weekend and the weekend before and I’ll be thinking the same thing next weekend. But this weekend is pretty special for us here.  On this holiday weekend we are joined by a record number of new Picnikers — 50,000+ new Facebook users! Welcome! Pull up a blanket and have some chicken.

A big congratulations to the Facebook crew on the F8 launch. They have changed the face of social networks. If you haven’t seen it, go sign up now!

While you’re checking out the new Facebook F8 features, be sure to try the new Facebook apps from our friends at Snapvine and Box.

Enjoy!

It looks like we were too popular! We’ve run into a limit on Facebook and our calls to Facebook are currently being rejected. We’re in contact with Facebook and they are scrambling to raise the limit. In the mean time you can still use Picnik with all of the other services like Flickr and Picasa.

Update (11:02 PM): It looks like the folks at Facebook have fixed the problem. We’re back!

From the beginning we’ve designed Picnik to be integrated with 3rd party sites. We dream of having easy, powerful, fun photo editing tools wherever our photos are. Today Facebook has made it possible for us to tightly integrate in just the way we’ve imagined.

We’re happy to announce Picnik’s Facebook integration. After adding Picnik to Facebook it lives as a link right next to Facebook’s Photos link. Click it and you’ll see all your Facebook photos. Open any of them and edit to your heart’s content. Then save your new photo right back to Facebook to share with your friends. You can also easily move photos between Flickr, Picasa Web, and Facebook.

This is the future of best of breed, integrated web applications. You’ve got to see it for yourself! If you have a Facebook account, just click this link to hook it up with Picnik: http://apps.facebook.com/add.php?api_key=e2a53b543852fbddfaa130af2cd49d39.

If you don’t have a Facebook account create one!

We’re adding Facebook integration to Picnik. It’s great and works pretty much the same as our Flickr and Picasa Web integration but it needs more testing before we unleash it on the world. If you have Facebook and Picnik accounts we’d love it if you could help us out.

To sign up, log in to Picnik and click the Feedback button. Mention Facebook in the subject and send it. We’ll get you hooked up right away and you can try out the Facebook support. Please let us know what works, what doesn’t, and what could be better. Thanks!

We’re Hiring! If you’re an experienced application programmer in the Seattle area who is looking for a great team then you’ve come to the right place. Picnik is a wonderful place to work. We’re a small team of talented, experienced folk who also know how to achieve work/life balance. We’re looking for someone who has significant application development experience, knows how to work well both independently and with a team and is passionate about creating the next great Rich Internet Application. All of our engineers (including me!) work on all aspects of the product which gives you the opportunity to learn something new in addition to exercising your well developed programming skills.

Send your resume to contact@picnik.com.

Just when you think you have it all, there is more! boo-yah.

We just put out a new release on the server with a bunch of new goodies. Here is a quick list of what you’ll find next time you Picnik:

– Flash Sign In and Register forms. Now we have a fully Picnik-ified registration process
– Home tab! – everything here is new or reorganized
– Picnik loads faster
– Search field in the Flickr Photos page. Search your photostream by tags or keywords
– Rockin’ new Special Effects:  Local Contrast, Unsharp Mask and HDR-ish!

As always, keep that feedback coming!

p.s. Stay tuned, big new feature due late next week…

As promised, Picnik is now running behind Perlbal! This should make our use of MogileFS much more efficient as well as open the door for better scalability.

We tried hard to not break anything.  However, as always, let us know if we did.

I wouldn’t have predicted this but since we went public with Picnik our number 1 feature request has been for a way to integrate Picnik’s great photo editing experience directly inside of existing photo-hosting sites. We hear from every kind of site and service that does something with photos, from modeling agencies to social networks to blogging services to photo sharing sites.

So OK, here you go. With the new Picnik API third-party sites can provide all of Picnik’s editing and bridging (importing/exporting) capabilities to their users, fully integrated. We designed the API to make this scenario possible: When a user of a site/service sees a photo or a thumbnail on a page, they also see an ‘Edit’ button nearby. Click it to bring up Picnik with the photo loaded and ready for editing. When it’s done just click Save to return the edited photo to the originating site. Convenient, seamless, and fast.

Another great scenario is improved uploading. Instead of being limited to uploading photos from their computers users can pull from all the photo sites and services that Picnik connects to.

We’re making these scenarios and more possible without even leaving the site that hosts the photo! What’s more we’re providing it for free. Users who upgrade to the premium version of Picnik will have access to the full Picnik feature set everywhere Picnik is integrated.

Do you manage a site or service whose users would benefit from easy to use integrated photo editing? We’re looking for a few more beta testers for the Picnik Service, developers ready to integrate Picnik into their sites. If this is you fill out the API key request form and we’ll get you hooked up ASAP.

We call it Release 15 and in addition to all the great under-the-covers stuff that Mike has been talking about we’ve included some fun and useful features.

Fullscreen button. We’ve had a fullscreen mode for awhile now but kept it cleverly concealed. We love using Picnik full screen and now that we’ve had time to apply the proper caveats (Flash disables the keyboard in fullscreen mode) we’re boosting its prominence.

UI refinements for when Picnik is sized small. We still have a little more work to do but our goal is for Picnik to be useable down to sizes ~640×480. There’s some amazing smarts behind this so Picnik takes advantage of as much or as little space as you give it.

Picnik Tools. You have to check these out. No matter what browser you use we’ve made it easy to import images from the web into Picnik. But if you’re using Firefox we have a special treat. The Firefox extension snapshots entire web pages and brings them into Picnik for editing! I’m snapshotting everything these days: cool sites to share with my friends, anything I want to blog about, even purchase receipts! Then they’re easy to mark up, crop down, gussy up with Picnik and save, email, print, whatever.

Tumblr, AOL, and ‘Other…’ added to Email to Web Site. If a site accepts emails, Picnik makes it easy to get your photos there.

Crop enhancements for creating avatars and wallpaper. Is your Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Blogger, Google Talk, Xanga, or Last.fm icon getting stale? No more excuses now that Picnik makes it easy to create a new one.

3 new Special Effects: Heat Map, Duo-Tone, and Lomo. Two parts fun, one part functional. You decide which is which.

Enjoy!