MySpace is in some trouble. The social network announced on Tuesday that it has been forced to reduce its workforce by 30 percent amid a decline in advertising revenue and outside pressure from competitors. It's a problem, but MySpace does have at least a few things going for it.
Those include some cool applications. Apps developed for Facebook tend to get more attention in the social-networking space, but these 10, ranging from music- to game-centric, are all worth trying out.
10 MySpace apps
Causes: Like its Facebook counterpart, Causes is one of the best apps in this roundup for one reason: it helps you help others.
After you sign up, the app lets you pick a "cause" about which you care. From animal rights to protecting children, you can join any cause and try to increase its awareness. You can donate to the cause and post bulletins on MySpace, so all your friends know what you're supporting. It's a really great app.
Causes is a great app that makes you feel better about yourself.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Family Guy Picture Hunt: The Family Guy Picture Hunt might not be as useful as some of the other apps in this roundup, but it's extremely fun. Simply look at a picture from one of your favorite scenes from the television show Family Guy, and try to find the different areas on the picture that match the blocks to the right of the image. At first glance, it seems like a simple game, but you'll quickly realize that it's difficult and fun. The game is timed, so you can play with friends and see who is the superior searcher.
Find the right photo chunks with Stewie's help.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Family Tree: Like its Facebook counterpart, Family Tree is a really great app. When you access it, the app lists all your MySpace friends and asks you to find family members. It then sends confirmation requests to make sure that they're really family members.
Once complete, you can input your relationship to those people, and the app will create a family tree. The app's best feature is the option to see which people might be in your family. It does that by analyzing your friends list to see if there are any matches you might have missed. The app even has a family news feed, so you can be kept abreast of what's going on in each other's lives.
Family Tree lets you connect with your loved ones.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
New applications for Yahoo Mail, such as this one from PayPal, let you send money right from your inbox without having to visit PayPal's site.
(Credit: Yahoo)Yahoo has added new applications for its users in another step toward giving its users more and more to do from within Yahoo.
The company plans to announce the limited beta of three new Yahoo Mail applications from PayPal, Picnik, and Zumo Drive on Friday. Yahoo Mail users who have indicated an interest in signing up for Yahoo's beta programs will be the first to get a crack at the new services, with the applications coming to the wider user base over the next several months.
It's all part of Yahoo's Open Strategy, designed to let outside developers tap into the company's properties and offer their wares inside Yahoo's network of sites. It's becoming an old story, but the trend these days in the Internet world is the proliferation of large sites like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook as development platforms unto themselves, with application developers spending more and more time writing programs that run on those sites, rather than traditional operating systems.
For example, PayPal's application will let Yahoo Mail users send money to another user by opening a window like a tab in a browser. Picnik, a popular browser-based photo editing tool, will bring that feature to Yahoo Mail in a similar way, letting you open the service right from an e-mail message.
Yahoo is also expanding the Open Strategy to other parts of its portfolio of sites. Wordpress bloggers will be able to post to their blogs from their MyYahoo page, and manage their money with Mint.com's services. And Yahoo TV Widgets will now support searching and viewing of archrival Google's YouTube video collection.
It's taken Yahoo quite some time to put these applications together, first announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy in April 2008 but not taking it live until last December, when it unveiled the first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page. It also appears the company plans to wrap these applications along with forthcoming ones into a redesign of its homepage, which CEO Carol Bartz said this week would arrive "later this fall."
The idea is convenience: letting users get everything they need and want in one place. But the upshot is that by providing incentives to stick around on Yahoo, the company is making it more likely that you'll stumble upon something else at Yahoo, such as an ad or another service that drives a search query: 98 percent of Yahoo's searches come from people who are already on the site.
Picnik has a new and simple way of distributing photos you've just edited in your browser. Using application programming interfaces from Photobucket's TwitGoo photo-hosting service and Twitter, it lets you compose a tweet that includes a link to the photo right inside of the editor.
To do this you simply link up your Twitter account once, and Picnik saves your credentials for future use. It also lets you take a shot you've edited in Picnik and quickly make it either your Twitter profile picture, or background. In either case it's skipping the step of you having to venture off Picnik to make the changes.
There are several benefits to blasting out photos over Twitter. People on many modern desktop clients can view the image without leaving their app. And TwitGoo provides a simple way for other people to see the original and directly respond or retweet it from their own accounts, which can give you extra distribution power if people like what you've just made.
You can take photos you've just edited in Picnik and send them straight to Twitter with a simple new feature.
(Credit: CNET)
Online streaming video service Stickam announced that its offering is now available to all Java-enabled phones. Users will be able to stream video over the Web from their mobile phones with the help of the company's app, Stickam Mobile. According to the company, Stickam Mobile is now available to more than 100 Java-enabled devices, including models from RIM, LG, Nokia, and HTC. The Android-based G1 from T-Mobile is also supported.
Online photo-editing service Picnik announced Monday that it has inked a deal with social-publishing platform Wetpaint. According to the company, Wetpaint's publishing offering will now feature Picnik's photo-editing services. Once Wetpaint users click "edit photo," they will have full access to Picnik's tools. The integrated service is available now to all Wetpaint users.
Cooliris, a company that provides online 3D services, announced that it has raised $15 million in its second round of funding. The round was led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. It plans to use the funding to expand its new "3D Wall" service, which allows users to browse media online in 3D.
Online ad network Collective Media announced that it has closed a $20 million round of funding. The round was led by Accel Partners. The company plans to use the funding to "fuel organic growth" and explore acquisitions both domestically and abroad. So far, there is no word on possible acquisition targets Collective Media might be courting.
Picnik has just rolled out some neat new features for casual enthusiasts of photo editing.
Now found on the bottom of the editing environment is something called a "photo basket," which includes a pool of photos garnered from cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, and Photobucket, as well as uploads from users' hard drives. It also doubles as the new multiphoto uploader for those looking to unload the entirety of their memory card.
Switching between your photo sources in the basket is nearly instantaneous, and more importantly, it doesn't take you away from what you're working on. The photo basket is more than just a productivity booster; it's the home of a new feature that lets users create works of art using individual photographs as layers.
Sure, it's missing the other 80 percent of what's found on something like Adobe Photoshop, but with the use of transparency, text, and the myriad of filter effects, you can create some truly good-looking creations with a very minimal amount of effort.
Picnik now lets you put together multi-photo creations using layers. Like advanced photo editing applications each layer can be given different blend modes, transparencies, and color masks. Seen here is a collection of four photos stacked on top of one another with varying effects added on top of one another.
(Credit: CNET Networks )When Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato demoed this for me a few months back he insisted this wasn't the first step in making Picnik compete with tools like Scrapblog or Glogster. Instead it was in response to users, who had been requesting support for layers since launch. Part of that request included contextual menu support, so if you're working with more than a few layers you can simply right click to manage what order they appear in.
One thing to note is that there are some limitations built to entice users into upgrading to Picnik's premium subscription service. One of those is in the number of photos you're able to drag up into the canvas. Free users can use up to five in any given workspace, whereas premium users can add as many as they'd like. The collage feature caps off at five photos for free users and 36 for premium. Likewise, free users can only upload five shots at a time, with premium users getting 100. These are all limitations that will eventually be lifted as other premium features filter down.
As a treat for Webware readers Picnik has given us 30 free 90-day premium upgrades to give out. The premium membership will take away the ads and give you advanced access to some of the more advanced features like the extra filters and a fonts. To get yours just enter your contact information on this form (note: this link opens as a pop-up). We'll pick the 30 winners randomly, and you have until midnight (PST) on Sunday to enter. We'll send the winners their prizes on Monday.
It's a virtual arms race among Web-based photo editors. Each one is trying to partner with as many third-party services as possible in an attempt to gain mass appeal. This morning Picnik, which has already begun to get some traction as the primary editing tool for Flickr has teamed up with Photobox, another large photo host in the United Kingdom.
Photobox is about a fifth of the size of Flickr in active users, and the two have very different services. Photobox provides 1,000MB of storage and gives users more space each time they order prints while Flickr operates on a paid premium membership that requires a yearly subscription of $25.
Also starting today Picnik users will be able to print their shots using QOOP which lets you print your photos on items such as coffee mugs, posters, and T-shirts. Users of Flickr and Picnik won't find this very useful since Flickr's offered QOOP integration since mid-2005. However, folks who are using Picnik as a standalone editor and replacement for desktop software will find that it's an important partnership. In my chat with Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato back in February, he had noted that a good deal of Picnik users fit that demographic, and that they simply take the edited shots back to their hard drives instead of to other services.
Picnik users now have new options to print their photos using QOOP. They can also grab and edit photos from Photobox. (click to enlarge)
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Picnik, one of my personal favorites for editing photos online launched a new array of advanced editing tools a few hours ago. You can read about some of them from our earlier post, or the official announcement over at the company's blog. The biggest news is that many of the ones that previously required a paid, premium membership are now available to free users.
I got a chance to talk to Picnik's CEO Jonathan Sposato about the update, as well as the past and future of the company. The big topic was the looming release of Adobe's Photoshop Express, something that doesn't seem to have Sposato and company too worried. "Adobe has a business to protect. Picnik has a business to build," Sposato said. He also noted that early looks of the product (see coverage) show that there might not be integration with social services people are already using--something Sposato believes critical to Picnik's adoption, and that has served the company well.
As for competing services encroaching on Picnik's space, including FotoFlexer, which unveiled its no-fee Pro service last month, Sposato says his company is confident about the current road map and feature release schedule, which is set to trickle down to free users (just like what happened today). "We've got more engineers now, and that means we're able to turn out new features faster than before."
Looking back, Picnik became the official editor of photos on Flickr in December and has since experienced tremendous growth. The company wouldn't share its official numbers with us, but noted that Flickr has provided double digit percentages of site growth in addition to the highest ratio of users that give the free service a try and then upgrade to the premium membership. Sposato also noted that Flickr users are almost always uploading their shots back to the service, often replacing the original shot with the edited one--a process that is now reversible with the new history feature similar to the one for files seen over at Box.net.
Picnik's online photo-editing site now has ads except for those with premium accounts.
(Credit: Picnik)Picnik, an online photo-editing site, has altered course.
In a change announced Wednesday in the , the Seattle company said those with free accounts now will be able to use editing tools previously reserved for those who've paid for premium subscriptions--but they'll also see ads.
Premium subscribers won't get the ads, though, and will get a handful of other perks, including fonts from FontShop, better connections to social networks, and early access to new features. Subscriptions cost $24.95 per year.
"Our goal is to make Picnik the best photo editing experience available, regardless of whether you support us directly or our advertisers do," the company said on the blog.
Picnik isn't alone. Among others, editing powerhouse Adobe Systems is working on its online Photoshop Express product. Adobe had hoped to launch a beta in 2007, but the company is still working on the technology.
Update 6:20 p.m. PT: I misunderstood Picnik's statement that "Now all Picnik users will have full access to our huge range of edit tools, special effects, fonts, and shapes that previously were only available as premium features." Some features, including the tone curve editing control, are still available only to premium subscribers. For a full list, look at the chart on their blog. I adjusted the posting accordingly, including switching out the older image.
Web based photo editor FotoFlexer has been given an update this morning that's specifically designed to accommodate the needs of advanced users. The company is calling it "pro," although it's not quite a full replacement for traditionally "professional" photo editing applications such as Adobe's Photoshop. It's also not going to be a pay service, despite the pro moniker.
Among the major additions is the inclusion of curves and high resolution editing, which let users work with large pictures in their native resolutions. The new features also let users adjust coloring, contrast, and exposure. There's also a new feature called "smart scissors" that resembles the magnetic lasso tool found in Photoshop, although it uses FotoFlexer's "Predictive Pixel Partitioning" technology to determine the object's borders without user input.
One feature that may useful to people who use the service often is a new preference saver. It will automatically tune itself based the tools used on a regular basis and have them set the next time the user logs in. It's easily comparable with Photoshop's workspace preferences, letting users adjust what tools they want open each time they start editing a photo.
In addition to the pro-oriented tools, FotoFlexer has also added new color effects (like Photoshop's filters), along with a new way to add borders to photos that makes the process require less clicks.
I'm still partial to competitor Picnik when it comes to online photo editing because of its deep level integration with Flickr and Box.net, but FotoFlexer definitely remains one of the best online editors, especially for users who don't want to shell out the $25 a year for Picnik's pro offerings.
The new smart scissors feature lets users pick out someone from a photo like they would with Photoshop's magnetic lasso, although with a little more ease.
(Credit: Arbor Labs Inc.)
Picnik, an online photo-editing service, has released specifications that will let other Web sites use its tools.
The Seattle company on Tuesday released its application programming interface, or API, called Picnik-in-a-Box. "Sites can use the Picnik interface to load, edit, and save specific images provided by users, customize certain portions of the Picnik interface, and give users a superior image-importing and -exporting experience for applications or Web sites," the company said in a statement.
Web site developers wishing to employ the feature can obtain a key from Picnik that grants access to the API, Picnik said.
Among sites using the API today are Photoextract.com, Fineartstudioonline.com, Freewebs.com, Box.net, Photoworks.com, ZoomShare.com, and Fliptrack.com Flickr and Lexmark both use a more elaborate, customized version, Picnik said.
Image-editing powerhouse Adobe Systems is working on its own online editing tool, Photoshop Express.
