On the heels of Zoomshare Widgets comes picnik. picnik is a third-party website that provides online image editing and enhancement tools to the Zoomshare Photo Album. Think of it as a Photoshop-lite website. picnik’s tools include everything from cropping and rotating images, to red eye removal, color adjustment and a slew of cool special effects. Zoomshare users simply click on the “Edit w/picnik” button for an album photo and then do the image editing right in their web browser, with no software to download.
What’s really cool about both widgets and picnik is the ability to use more than one website or service without having to redo everything for each system. For example, you can have a Blogger account – where you share your thoughts with your friends, family and/or co-workers – and simply add a Flipbook widget from Zoomshare – where you keep all of your organized photos – to share those photos with the same audience. With picnik, you can now edit those same photos and dress them up before sharing.
In other words, you have something like this illustration, where you use the web service/toolset of your preference, but without the extra legwork of having to re-upload everything each time, since that’s handled by us here at Zoomshare.
All of this represents some concrete examples of the current buzzword du jour, Web 2.0. In one of the many definitions of Web 2.0, the idea behind dynamic community websites is to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. One could interpret that as meaning sharing between web services, since users, even the same user, has an account to more than one service. Thus, to help and keep a user(s) the service in question needs to facilitate sharing between services just as much as it needs to facilitate sharing between users.
The big question is how much (or for how long) will competing services facilitate sharing between services, keeping their various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) open. Zoomshare wants you to post your Widgets anywhere, that’s why we created the feature. But, Blogger is competition, after all Zoomshare has its own blogging tool too. MySpace, for example, won’t allow you to post Zoomshare Widgets. Part is security, Javascript, which is the language our widget platform is built on, can introduce problems. But part of it is also business; MySpace wants advertising dollars for your eyeballs. So does Zoomshare and so do you, which is why each widget has a ‘Powered By Zoomshare’ badge on it. But we don’t pay MySpace for advertising, so why should they allow our widgets, which can be seen as a form of advertising, on one level for our service, on another for your website?
Interesting, don’t you think?