All of us are very heads-down this week on a wide variety of new things for Picnik.  For example (and in no particular order) Steve’s working on a couple very cool new effects that he demo’d for us the other day.  Plus he continues to improve and streamline the experience of editing photos from one of our many cool partners like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photoworks.  Some new partners coming soon!

Mike is deep in the banking part of the e-commerce industry this week.  He is building the back end support for the subscription system… making it a solid experience so our Premium users can continue Picniking without a hitch.

Brian is working on very related stuff building and integrating the front-end aspects of the subscription system.  But also (spoiler alerts!) he is adding new fonts and shapes!  What I’ve seen over his shoulder is WAY cool… carrying some momentum from early design work Peter had laid out.

Jonathan and Monica have been connecting us with tons of reviews and write-ups… even a little TV action!  I’ll get a list together in the next few days for you to check out.

I won’t run down everyone today, you can see what I’m up to… especially if you’ve sent feedback lately. :)

BTW – did you know you can add Picnik as a Facebook application?  Do a search for “Picnik” on facebook, or just click this link.

Shouts to our Flickr and Facebook user groups!

- Picnik de Fotos… Hola!
- *picnik addicts * BFF!

It looks like Google is returning errors to the requests that we make. So, for the moment, our PicasaWeb support is broken:(

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Update:  Looks like it’s working again.  Enjoy!

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!

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!