I never even knew Twitpic was an independent service like Imgur. I thought it was just an url shortening/caching feature built right in to Twitter (I don't Tweet)
(Not a Twitter user). Isn't it in Twitter's best interest to keep Twitpic around? From a strictly business point of view, why don't they squeeze them, then buy them for pennies an integrate them into their own service?
Edit: or just scrape all the images, put them into their own service, then cut them out?
My opinion is that you're right but it's Twitter's money and it knows lots of things (how many Twitpics, how much traffic etc) that the rest of us don't...
Could be a talent acquisition (not saying that's likely to be the case, just an example of why someone would buy them even with a poor business model).
I am pretty sure these guys are a little crazy - they said Twitter was crushing their brand and they had no resources, then wouldn't let their users export their photos and now are being acquired. Something fishy is going on.
TwitPic has gone out of their way for years to make it difficult to get your pictures out. Some services were created to try and make it easy to move your pictures to another provider and TwitPic always blocked it. They said that people could export one at a time manually only.
Why would you want to get your pictures out? If you uploaded them, then you already have the originals. If you uploaded them, watched them get reduced to a very small size, then deleted your originals then you're an idiot.
Twitpic is not and never has been a photo storage service. It was/is a service for adding pics to tweets. That's all.
It doesn't make any sense to move them to another provider: the Twitpic addresses are already included in the tweets and Twitter isn't going to change those to different URLs.
So, these are people who take photos on device and then dispose of said device without even backing it up or copying their pictures to some form of long term storage?
Since Twitpic's purpose was to post photos inline at Twitter, what proportion of their photos have they probably lost?
Given that they can't even cope with the idea of copying their pics off this old device, what are the odds that they can cope with the idea of downloading an archive from Twitpic?
I'm all in favor of companies letting you take your data out of any service you've used, on principle, but frankly, this scenario doesn't make a lot of sense.
If you have the file then you're uploading a copy, not the original. You're never _moving_ files to Twitpic. That makes no sense.
It also wouldn't be smart because, as regular users quickly discovered, Twitpic's system often didn't work so you had to upload the same pic again. And again.
Then there's the fact that -- very, very obviously -- if you upload a 4000 x 3000 photo, Twitpic reduces it to the sort of tiny size that fits into a tweet. (Twitter does the same.)
I used Twitpic daily for many years, and I know it very well. The only thing that would be worth retrieving is the hit-counts for various pics, some of which went over 20,000. However, it's hardly a big deal if I lose those numbers. They're not of any practical value.
So, plenty of downvotes from people who presumably don't understand Twitpic and can't actually write a rational fact-based reply. Might as well have stayed on Reddit....
I didn't downvote, but I can certainly see both perspectives of this argument. They may not make rational sense to you, but they definitely do to other people. Assuming people consume a service one certain way is never a good way to design a product.
I can't speak to exactly why you're being downvoted, but your comments read as very defensive and angry.
I didn't downvote (the downvoting system on HN sucks), but I wouldn't be surprised why they did - some of your comments weren't really thought through well.
For example, not being able to imagine people wanting to save pictures from the service - people can lose their local copies from device/hard drive failure, or lost cellphones, and the digital copies are the only ones that remain. I can attest that this has happened to me.
I'd obviously disagree that my comments weren't thought through. They are factual and logical, based on many years of using the system almost every day.
Anyone who has a different view of the facts could present a counter-argument, but really, no one has.
people can lose their local copies from device/hard drive failure, or lost cellphones
Yes, this is true. But as I pointed out, Twitpic is not and never has been a storage service, and it does not keep original photos. The business was set up to post pics to Twitter, not to cater for the very small number of people who might have suffered in this way.
That said, all those photos are STILL AVAILABLE ON TWITPIC and can easily be saved from its pages. A simple browser extension would even download several of them at a time.
The only counter argument, as far as I can see, is that Twitpic should have been set up to provide a different type of service, perhaps called Storepic or whatever. But it wasn't. No amount of downvoting hides the fact that some people are simply failing to understand this simple truth.
The problem with the downvoting system on HN is that users are actively encouraged by the site staff to downvote posts that they think are bad and don't encourage creating discussion around disagreements if the users think they're worth burying.
I should also mention, I made no mention of using Twitpic as a storage service. Even getting a compressed/altered version of original photos is better than completely losing them many times.
OP said they "wouldn't let their users export their photos" which is different from archiving other users' photos. It is an issue but it's a different issue IMO. I don't think that pretending it's the same issue helps.
Having actually worked to implement a last minute export feature, I can attest that they went out of their way to make it difficult - with weird restrictions, and no responsiveness on API rate limiting - I'm glad they'll live on, but I do feel they definitely have some trust to regain...
I understand the fundamental argument here, but were people really thinking that twitpic was some kind of online image archive? Are there lots of people operating on the assumption that twitpic was going to be forever available and available as an image catalog?
I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. Berating twitpic for not having an export seems a little bit odd to me.
It's not really people using it as their own personal archive, it's that it is an online archive as a whole. I believe some people were trying to archive all the photos contained in TwitPic but were getting blocked.
That's correct. Archive Team was working on it but their crawlers got banned. TwitPic said something along the lines of them having a better solution, which I suppose was this.
I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online.
Indeed, and for that reason it's a shame why only few services allow seamless synchronization. Apparently, you can show Google Drive photos in Google Plus, but not with an Apps account (which I have). Dropbox currently comes closest: I can add photos from files/folders to Dropbox photo albums. This is really the nicest way of photo sharing: I can just copy a photo to my Dropbox folder, share it in an album as in Flickr. My local Dropbox folder is backed up through time machine, etc.
Of course, Dropbox' album functionality is currently severely limited. I'd really like to see them expand it, or Google to make their service smoother and generally available, or some startup that makes photo albums from your Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive folders.
I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online.
These are really not the same types of service.
* Twitpic was for posting photos incline on Twitter in the days before Twitter added that feature. This is a very specific function: it's not a photo storage site, and never has been.
* Imgur was originally for sharing photos on reddit, but not inline: you go to Imgur to view them. But there's no guarantee that your photos won't be deleted for one reason or another (as the celebrity nudes were deleted).
* Facebook is for sharing photos with friends. There's every expectation that they'll be available as long as you have a Facebook account, and you can download them. However, there's no guarantee that your original photos will be saved in their original resolution. Again, it's not an archival back-up site.
They are different sites, set up to provide different functions.
Fishy? Their post generated a lot of attention and certainly attracted acquisition offers. This could have been intentional or not, but unless they have some hard-and-fast reason not to sell this doesn't seem like the most unlikely outcome.
The fishy part is that they were shutting down for a phony reason. They never had a trademark, so it made no sense to shut down the company when they ended up not getting one. Twitter wasn't suing them or cutting off API access, they were just against the trademark. Coincidentally (perhaps), the service was hemorrhaging users while storage costs remained pretty constant. If they wanted to soldier on and continue the service there was absolutely nothing stopping them.
It smells like a big scare tactic to put the mess on someone else's plate. It worked I guess.
The most likely explanation, which was suggested by someone else but unfortunately I forget who, is that the founder of TwitPic was simply tired of dealing with Twitter and their increasingly-hostile stance towards third-party developers (even though in this case it's a service and not a client). This trademark thing may have just been the final straw. And in light of that, being acquired makes perfect sense as it means the founder still gets to stop dealing with Twitter and let the new owners deal with them now.
I think he's already made the money (it used to be waaay bigger and make a ton more) and now wants to work on his new startup. Blaming Twitter for the trademark app was just a really easy excuse. Being able to call it an acquisition is even better.
This is interesting, considering just two weeks ago (to the day), they had announced they were shutting down. Wonder who bought them, if it wasn't Twitter.
They have yet to say that they aren't still removing all old pictures and changing domain names and thus breaking all tweets. All they've said is that they are acquired which doesn't actually clear up the problem.
Have to wonder if it is too late. Everyone I knew still using twitpic switched to using twitter for images following the issues and announcement a couple weeks ago[1]. Cannot think of a reason they would switch back. What is the value proposition?
[1] Prime example is the bostonfire twitter account. They were using twitpic, seemingly out of stagnancy in not changing services. When they couldn't post pictures on September 4, they switched to posting pictures directly to twitter. Cannot think of a reason to switch back.
I've had a lot of problems with Twitter's images not loading in the past few weeks. If Twitter continues to have problems loading images and, _if_ my entire account revolved around posting images, I would probably switch to Twitpic.
Twitter already took Twitpic's business away, by enabling users to post pics inline in Twitter.
It would be nice if Twitter bought Twitpic and shut it down to new posts, but maintained the existing photos at the old links. Otherwise there would be lots of old tweets where the pics no longer worked.
I can't understand why Twitter does have now developer conferences when they try to kill third party clients and services. Same for embedding pictures from others services (instagram, twitpic etc...).
