
“We've been acquired and Twitpic will live on” - wanghq
https://twitter.com/TwitPic/status/512705809696837632
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nly
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)

~~~
traek
No, but Twitter does have a built-in picture sharing service. That's part of
the reason that Twitpic is doing so poorly.

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scholia
Correct. It does now, but it didn't when Twitpic started.

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IgorPartola
(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?

~~~
scholia
I already commented below
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8338481)

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...

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owenwil
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.

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LeoPanthera
> then wouldn't let their users export their photos

Huh? They said they would be implementing an export function, have in fact now
done so. It can be found here, at the bottom of the page:

[http://twitpic.com/account/settings](http://twitpic.com/account/settings)

~~~
Touche
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.

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scholia
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.

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lmz
Are there no cases where a Twitter client takes a picture and immediately
uploads it to Twitpic, without keeping a local copy?

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wldcordeiro
Or those _rare_ cases where people upload it on a device they no longer own.

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scholia
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.

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mendort
Sometimes 'dispose of' means 'accidentally drops in a lake'. Accidents
happens, and inadequate backups are part of the human condition.

~~~
scholia
True, but the original photos are not on Twitpic, and they can always right-
click and save them from the web interface.

Anyway, that's an extreme case, and web services are typically not set up to
deal with extreme (in fact, totally hypothetical) cases.

I still haven't seen anybody put up a rational counter-argument. Does that
mean nobody can?

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crazypyro
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.

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wanghq
FYI, the shutting down announcement: [http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-
is-shutting-down/](http://blog.twitpic.com/2014/09/twitpic-is-shutting-down/)

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cristianbica
So their little blackmail on twitter worked :)

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bubblicious
Looks like it, yeah... Personnally I'm not too fond of either behaviour in
that story.

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treelovinhippie
I hope it was Twitter via an acquisympathy (new phrase, I think it'll catch
on)

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kamilszybalski
There's a reason good PR people get paid well..

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thelsdj
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.

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cowsandmilk
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.

~~~
tylerlh
I'm curious if Twitter finally just bought them so they don't end up with a
ton of broken images after they shut down.

I can't imagine someone acquiring twitpic just to continue operating it the
same way it has been.

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lotophage
If they're being acquired by twitter, that would be one incredibly hostile
acquisition!

~~~
scholia
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.

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lmedinas
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...).

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cwyers
Instagram took themselves off Twitter after the Facebook acquisition, they
weren't kicked off.

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3pt14159
Twitter played hardball and lost. Besides search companies like Google /
Microsoft (Bing), I can't really see any other acquirer.

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elwell
Is was hard to imagine they could actually shut down since so much of twitter
is composed of twitpic.

