PlanetEye
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December 5th, 2007
Strange Move: Flickr Partners with Picnik
- Mark Evans
- Director, Community
By Mark Evans
With a lot of fanfare, Flickr has announced that its users can now easily edit their photos. It’s a solid and logical move.
The mystery is Flickr is offering photo-editing through a partnership with Picnik, which provides a very user-friendly online service. It really begs two questions:
1. Why didn’t Flickr develop its own photo-editing tool.
2. If Flickr is so excited about Picnik, why not use some of Yahoo’s cash to buy it? After all, the acquisition of cool online services is all the rage these days.
The answer behind the partner-rather-than-acquire announce may lie in Yahoo’s mediocre track record after it purchases interesting start-ups. You could make a solid argument, for example, that innovation has Flickr has been, at best, modest since Yahoo acquired it in 2005 for a reported $50-million. Meanwhile, there has been little happening at del.icio.us since Yahoo snapped the book-marking service two years ago.
Perhaps Picnik wants to date Flickr/Yahoo before it decides to get married. Maybe Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato figures there’s no rush to jump into a deal right now given Picnik is just starting to create some much-deserved buzz. It should be noted that Sposato sold Phatbits to Google in 2005 so he’s got some good experience when it comes to making deals with an online giant.
For more thoughts on the Flickr-Picnik partnership, check out TechCrunch, parislemon and Mashable, which mentions that Photobucket has been offering photo-editing tools for quite awhile, while RockYou beefed up its photo-editing tools through a deal with Zazzle.
Technorati Tags: Flickr, Picnik
3 Responses to “Strange Move: Flickr Partners with Picnik”
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December 5th, 2007 at 11:25 am
[...] more, check out the PlanetEye blog and Mathew Ingram, who’s tired a bunch of photo-editing [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
[...] a thousand groans from the offices of Adobe when they found out Picnik had partnered with FlickR. Mark Evans wonders aloud why FlickR/Yahoo just didn’t buy Picnik. Perhaps they saw this coming? Is it [...]
May 31st, 2008 at 7:46 am
[...] a thousand groans from the offices of Adobe when they found out Picnik had partnered with FlickR. Mark Evans wonders aloud why FlickR/Yahoo just didn’t buy Picnik. Perhaps they saw this coming? Is it [...]