Nik Software's Snapseed can adjust color, lighting, and add vintage filters, like in the photo above. Photo: Snapseed
Five months after Facebook's famous $1 billion Instagram purchase, Google is trying to get in on the photo-tweaking action too. The search giant has acquired Nik Software, the 17-year-old company behind photo-editing and filter app Snapseed. Though terms of the deal weren't disclosed, it's clearly not Instagram money. That said, Google is pouring cash into its widening battle with Facebook, adding more features to its still-scrappy (but growing) social network Google+. Snapseed is just the latest weapon in Google's fight to lure Facebook users over to its side.
Many compare Snapseed to Instagram, but Snapseed in many ways offers much more. It ought to, since unlike Instagram, it's software for which you pay anywhere from $5 to $20. With Instagram you can slap one of 16 filters and frames onto a picture, then change the focus and saturation, but Snapseed can do all that and then some. The app is known for precision adjustments to color, lighting, and color saturation, but it can also straighten, crop, sharpen, and add vintage and texture-based filters to photos. Within a year of launching Snapseed, the app reached 9 million users and won the 2011 iPad App of the Year. It's available for Mac and Windows for $20 and iOS for $5. An Android version has been promised since January of this year, but so far there's no sign of it. That ought to change pretty fast given the new owners, unless Snapseed gets absorbed into existing Google products.
Google+ has been photo-focused for sometime now, with unlimited photo storage in your Google+ account, photo-editing tools courtesy of Picasa, and the Instant Upload feature in the Google+ mobile app, which automatically sends every picture you take with your phone to your Google+ albums. The acquisition could help Google add even more photo features to Google+, or help it build its own Instagram-like functionality into the Google+ apps. It might not be enough to woo over current Facebook and Instagram die-hards, both clearly have a network effects advantage, but it would certainly make current Google+ users happy.
In light of the news, Google wants you to know that Google+ isn't the ghost town that many have made it out to be. Senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra confirmed the acquisition news in a Google+ post, but the majority of his update pointed out that the social network has reached a milestone of 400 million registered users – people who've signed up for the service either on their own or through an existing Gmail account.
He writes:
"This week we also hit an important milestone–over 400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+. It was only a year ago that we opened public sign-up, and we couldn't have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months."
Those numbers are not to be confused with people who actually use Google+ on a regular basis, and Gundotra wrote that 100 million people use the social network every month, either on their computer or mobile phone. Of course, those numbers are small compared to Facebook's 955 million monthly active users, but Google wants to make it clear that its still growing it new social network, one user – and one photo – at a time.
Sarah Mitroff 18 Sep, 2012
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Source: http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wired/index/~3/BDQMKdQJvqU/
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