Twitpic is shutting down

long time coming really. follows long narrative/twitter history where twitter forced it's way into owning the photo content shared on the service....allowing only a few like twitpic to maintain the key aspect 'embeddability/previews'. What still remains interesting to me is that at one point instagram was gaining an incredible amount of speed in becoming the defacto picture sharing service on twitter -- but then they had the spat with fb/insta and twitter stopped the previews for instagram pics. Instagram has a huge community so survived fine, but it could and still could be so much more with twitter integration...but that sanction has never been lifted.

When is Twitter shutting down its API?

Sad news. Just the latest victim in Twitter turning on it's own developer ecosystem. :-/

So, with three weeks notice, all tweets that have ever been posted that included a picture using Twitpic (which is a remarkable number) will no longer have their picture available? In fact, do we even have three weeks? I just did a search for "saurik twitpic" on Twitter (https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=saurik%20twitpic) to find people who had posted pictures of me, of them for me, or of my products to show to others, and I'm seeing just a bunch of broken images (the few that work, as in the few that still show images on Twitter's website, such as https://twitter.com/MuscleNerd/status/296068187353661440, are simply a cache from Twitter's twimg.com: clicking through to Twitpic doesn't work). It seems like twitpic is already offline :/. (So like, I was going to go through and try to frantically download images I'd find relevant in the next week, but I guess it is already too late.)

(edit:) Even the broken previews are now disappearing (making this both a little less obvious that there is missing content and also a little more barren-looking). I guess Twitter notices the original image is gone and stops trying to render it through twimg.com, so most of the tweets in my posted search result are now just "imageless" (before they looked like this one, which is older enough that I hadn't rendered it yet to get its cache to clear: http://cache.saurik.com/tinyimg/twitpicoff.png).

They stuck it out pretty long with a good customer base, I personally kept using them even after Twitter introduced the ability to embed images.

They just never adapted, I feel like their site design/experience hasn't changed since their initial launch.