Picnik took another step forward to cementing their lead in the online photo editing market with the release of their API - Picnik in a Box. As the Picnik team puts it:

"Picnik In A Box presents the complete Picnik UI right on top of your existing website. This is known as a "lightbox" technique and is becoming pretty common among advanced web applications. Although it takes a little more work than the other integration scenarios, it presents the most seamless experience to your users. They feel like they've never left your website and they still get to experience all of Picnik's photo-editing awesomeness."

This is great news for any site that has users uploading photos. Adobe's approach with Premiere Express has been to license the software to sites like YouTube and MTV, allowing their users to edit videos online. I don't know what effect Picnik's announcement will have on Photoshop Express, but the online photo editing space just got more interesting, that's for sure.

I can't wait until developers start mashing up these APIs into some truly cool applications. I'd love to see a Picnik / Ribbit application.