Twitpic, the photo sharing site to shut down

It has not been long that Twitpic announced it has found a buyer, the company has again announced the shutdown by this month’s end. Despite cutting down the previous rumors of shutdown by announcing its acquisition by some mystery buyer, the photo – sharing website declared that it would shut down finally. The early rumours came in during September when the company said that because of a legal dispute between Twitpic and Twitter, it would have to shut down its service. Later came the news that the company would remain business without any further details. However, Twitpic couldn’t come to an agreement with its mystery buyer – as said by Noah Everett (founder, Twitpic) in a statement on the website. Users have given time till 25th October for exporting their photos and videos. The dispute between the two arose due to trademark issues. Everett stated that they decided to shut down the company after Twitter said it won’t allow Twitpic to access its API (a tool used by developers for tapping into the social network’s platform) if it did not change its trademark.

2 weeks after the trademark battle, Twitpic raised an acquisition alarm giving hopes that it would continue to run; but did not revealed any details about the acquisition. Launched back in 2008, it was the favourite 3rd – party image sharing site of majority of Twitter users. Twitters used it as a media for citizen journalism by uploading images of newsworthy events to Twitpic and linking them to their tweets. Twitpic was often used people for posting pictures and videos on the micro – blogging service – Twitter.  Twitpic was similar to Flickr in many aspects. But there were few things that made it more popular with the Twitter users. Firstly it used Twitter usernames and passwords. Secondly, it used short URLs avoiding the use of URL shortening. Thirdly, you could comment on pictures through tweets. Twitpic according to its terms of agreement could distribute their photographs to their affiliates. However, since it never stated the name of its affiliates, this saw a lot of inquiries from the users. As a result it got boycotted by some of its users. Later the issue was addressed by Twitpic in its blog. People could upload photos to Twitpic through other apps such as TweetDeack, Tweetie, Twitterific, Twitfile, Echofon etc. According to stats, 45 percent of all photos shared on Twitter come from Twitpic.