Another question is: does hashpix have the license to do what I does? When people post a picture of twitter, that doesn't necessarily mean the give the license/rights for someone to include it in his album in another service.
To be completely honest, I haven't really thought about that. I haven't really really looked into that either.
However, I am basing this attempt on the belief that, if Twitter, TwitPic and Instagram can 'show' me your photos when I search for a particular hashtag, it automatically implies that each of them have acquired the redistribution rights.
At no point in the process am I claiming that I own these photos; in fact, all the photos link back to their original places. I'm merely collating symbolic links to them. In a sense, I'm (sort of) indexing them just the way a search engine would.
Am I making sense or am I being escapist with my answers here? Do let me know. I'd like to believe I am not breaking any laws or infringing any copyrights but IANAL, so I'm not really sure. :)
Thanks for the insightful question. You made me realize something that I had completely missed in my enthusiasm to code. :)
If not, I'll stop working on/maintaining it and devote my time to other pursuits - preferably ones that might bring in some money eventually.
PS: It is currently running on a Heroku instance because I can't afford to 'launch' it yet. :(
[1]: http://hashpix.herokuapp.com