Twitter has acquired website and photo archive – Twitpic – which was in deletion limbo after the site announced it was being sued by Twitter over its name.
“I’m happy to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to give them the Twitpic domain and photo archive, thus keeping the photos and links alive for the time being,” Twitpic creator Noah Everett announced Saturday in a blog post. “Twitter shares our goal of protecting our users and this data.”
We’re happy to announce we’ve been acquired and Twitpic will live on! We will post more details as we can disclose them
— TwitPic (@TwitPic) September 18, 2014
The first service to allow users to attach pictures to their tweets. The issue over Twitpic’s name was an issue with Twitter when the company applied for a trademark on its name.
I’m happy to announce we’ve reached an agreement with Twitter to give them http://t.co/OmGQHVKG0n. More here: http://t.co/IiASPzMoW4
— TwitPic (@TwitPic) October 25, 2014
In his final blog post, Everett described what the news means to its users:
- Twitpic will no longer be taking on new photos or data (the site will be in a read-only mode)
- The iOS and Android apps have been removed from the app stores and will no longer be supported
- You will still be able to login to your profile to delete content or delete your account on Twitpic.com
- You can still export and download your data / photo archive on Twitpic.com
In other words Twitter is shutting down Twitpic, but the pictures will live on in read only mode. This is a big move for Twitter and a smart one at that. Twitter doesn’t want old tweets with Twitpic photos to not load and leave millions of tweets without images. This is always a concern when users upload their content to third-party services. The closing of such a large service like Twitpic could erase millions and millions of memories and a large part of user history.
Tell is in the comments below what you think about Twitter’s attempt to save a large part of Twitter’s history.