ReadWriteWeb

In March, Google acquired the online photo editing service Picnik and today, the company is integrating Picnik with Picasa Web Albums, Google's online photo sharing service. Picnik, which allows users to perform basic photo editing functions and add stickers and text to images will retain its own branding and web presence, but Picasa users will now find an "Edit in Picnik" button as one of the options in the online version of Picasa.

The big news from earlier this week was the announcement that Google would be acquiring online photo editing service Picnik for an undisclosed amount. This marks Google's third acquisition of 2010 after buying Aardvark and reMail in February suggesting that the company could be going on an extended shopping spree much like in 2007 when it picked up 16 separate companies. Merger and acquisition (M&A) spending has floundered among tech companies in the last few years, but Google's early purchases this year could signal a return of this kind of spending.

Picnik just announced that it has been been acquired by Google. While the details surrounding the acquisition are still somewhat murky, the Picnik team just announced the acquisition on the company's blog. Picnik currently has 20 employees and, according to its own data, "millions of visitors every month." The company offers a free service as well as paid accounts and a number of third-party services, including Box.net and Flickr, use Picnik's API to offer the company's services to their customers. According to the company's announcement, the service will remain online and unchanged for the time being. The price of the acquisition has not been disclosed.

Web photo retouching service Picnik just announced a new partnership with Photobucket-based Twitter photo sharing service Twitgoo on its blog. The alliance will allow Picnik users to quickly share their retouched images on Twitter for free. In addition, twittering Picnik users can also apply the image as their Twitter background or update their Twitter user icon. Twitgoo uses your Twitter login to enable these extra sharing features.

- 37Signals publish a PDF book ("DIY publishing: There’s a new sheriff in town." -- suggestion to 37Signals: create a product that enables other authors to DIY publish...)

- Kottke on DIY book publishing (37Signals profit margin will probably be much higher than any royalties they would've got from a publishing company)

- eBay's Jason Steinhorn on convergence of browser and desktop (some interesting predictions, including that within 5 years '.com' branding will fade away)

- The IE7 team's radar screen (Jon Udell is pleased to hear that Microsoft is paying attention to browser compatibility issues now)

- Open AIM (AOL releases open API: "The AIM service is changing into an open and dynamic platform." -- Excellent!)

- Susan Mernit on Open AIM ("Of course, there is one catch--AOL still won't allow its' code to be used to link to other IM platforms.")

- Marc Canter is excited by AIM API ("There are almost 70M AIM users. Think about what you could do with that?)

- Ted Leonsis on Open AIM ("Our goal is to team up with developers to create a completely live and interactive experience across the Web and beyond.")

- Omnidrive beta and API ("With Omnidrive you can focus on making your product great while we take care of your storage matters.")

- arstechnica on Google GDrive ("Rumored to be in the works for some time, GDrive would offer users unlimited storage space for just about any kind of document.")

- Steve Rubel on beyond the blog ("...there is a burgeoning need for tools that help us cement all of the content that we want to track from our favorite galaxies into a unified interface.")

Flickr pic by 33mhz