Over the past several months, Google has been shutting down a number of its businesses and products. On Friday, the company announced another round of shut downs. That included the popular online photo editing site Picnik, which Google acquired in 2010. In its blog post explaining the move, Google said, "We’re retiring the service on April 19, 2012 so the Picnik team can continue creating photo-editing magic across Google products."
That move is not making users of the Picnik site happy at all. The official Picnik blog post that also announced the shut down has been flooded with over 1,000 comments since Friday, most of which are taking Google to task for closing the web site. They are also against having to join the company's Google+ social networking service in order to use many of Picnik's features after the site's shut down.
One poster, "Yogi" states:
This is not good. I have been trying to use Google+ but is very clumsy, unwieldy, and just plain not usable. I think that this is just another effort by Google to make its users use a product that is not very good. I love Picnick (sic), I hate Google+. I am considering closing my Google+ account.
Another poster, "Susan" writes:
I do not and will not use Google +
I resent being forced to use a product I do not need and do not want, just to have access to a great piece of software like Picnik.
Google, you disappoint me more every day.
So far Google has yet to comment on the protests against Picnik's planned shutdown. As we reported Friday, all of the site's premium features are now free to use until the site closes on April 19. People who paid for the premium service will get a refund.
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