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Twitpic is shutting down

blog.twitpic.com

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Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#11

Post by ChrisArchitect »

aaronpk wrote: post #3
ChrisArchitect wrote: post #2

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…

Actually it was Instagram that decided to stop including the Twitter preview of photos, because "we want images viewed on instagram.com". http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/05/kevin-systrom-on-pulling-tw...

sorry yeah, you're right. There just seemed to be an air of 'fb v twitter' and content owning about it anyways....and really, at the time anyone will remember that instagram was becoming really popular for sharing pics on instagram + twitter...and then boom. Insta silo'd and twitter aggressively pushing pic.twitter.com native hosting

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#12

Post by danbruc »

DanBlake wrote: post #7

So, there is a bunch of info we dont have... But would it not make sense to just rebrand? From a preliminary search on twitter, there is a huge amount of users still using twitpic. Seems like this is a biz that could/should make millions a year with some cost reductions and run mostly on autopilot. Also, what happens to the millions of pictures previously hosted with these guys? Even if you can backup/export all your…

Sound to me like they are trying to see if Twitter is willing to change their mind when they threaten to shut the service down and break all the tweets. Rebranding would be an obvious option but they would still have to keep to current domain alive in order to not break the links. Could they abandon the trademark and still keep the domain or could Twitter just grab the trademark and based on that later also try to claim the domain and maybe restore all the links from a backup?

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#13

Post by gorner »

DanBlake wrote: post #7

So, there is a bunch of info we dont have... But would it not make sense to just rebrand? From a preliminary search on twitter, there is a huge amount of users still using twitpic. Seems like this is a biz that could/should make millions a year with some cost reductions and run mostly on autopilot. Also, what happens to the millions of pictures previously hosted with these guys? Even if you can backup/export all your…

Yeah, they really should have just looked at rebranding. A few Instagram-related services (e.g. Webstagram, Statigram) had to do so recently, IIRC, and I don't think they're significantly worse off.

Thing is, even if Twitter tacitly condoned it for years, the name "TwitPic" is pretty obviously derived from "Twitter" and is trading on their (Twitter Inc.'s) reputation. Even their logo is styled similarly to the old Twitter wordmark. The blog post didn't even say Twitter wanted to force them to stop using the name, only that they shouldn't attempt to register a confusingly-similar trademark (though granted, forcing a rebrand might well have been the next step).

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#14

Post by OedipusRex »

At what point do you forego patents for the sake of usability. Twitpic has been around for so long and they have tons of media hosted, all of those Tweets are now essentially broken. Twitter should instead foster a relationship with Twitpic.

Twitpic is DEPENDENT on Twitter to work, it's not taking users from Twitter at all (other than hosting media). Truly sad to see.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#15

Post by IgorPartola »

DanBlake wrote: post #7

So, there is a bunch of info we dont have... But would it not make sense to just rebrand? From a preliminary search on twitter, there is a huge amount of users still using twitpic. Seems like this is a biz that could/should make millions a year with some cost reductions and run mostly on autopilot. Also, what happens to the millions of pictures previously hosted with these guys? Even if you can backup/export all your…

My thoughts exactly. Why is the trademark so important to them? And as I read it, Twitter never demanded that they stop using the name, just that they do not apply for the registered trademark. This decision seems rash.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#16

Post by dave1619 »

I don't understand why Twitpic would be shutting down. If they are growing and doing well, then why not just change the business name? Or is it that things aren't going well (usage dropping drastically) and they've already been thinking about shutting down or moving on, and maybe this trademark issue was just the last straw?

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#17

Post by bellerocky »

OedipusRex wrote: post #14

At what point do you forego patents for the sake of usability. Twitpic has been around for so long and they have tons of media hosted, all of those Tweets are now essentially broken. Twitter should instead foster a relationship with Twitpic. Twitpic is DEPENDENT on Twitter to work, it's not taking users from Twitter at all (other than hosting media). Truly sad to see.

There is no mention of patents anywhere in the post. This has nothing to do with patents.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#18

Post by Wilya »

saurik wrote: post #8

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…

The upload functionality seems broken right now. The site says my upload went fine, but I can't see the photo.

Are their image file servers getting hammered? Weird.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#19

Post by Kayou »

Lesson to learn: don't tie down your service and/or brand to an existing brand/service. Otherwise you're both dependent of that service and/or at risk to get sued sooner or later.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#20

Post by eric_h »

OedipusRex wrote: post #14

At what point do you forego patents for the sake of usability. Twitpic has been around for so long and they have tons of media hosted, all of those Tweets are now essentially broken. Twitter should instead foster a relationship with Twitpic. Twitpic is DEPENDENT on Twitter to work, it's not taking users from Twitter at all (other than hosting media). Truly sad to see.

USPTO: US Patent and Trademark Office. P is not the relevant letter here, T is.
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