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Twitpic is shutting down

blog.twitpic.com

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Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#131

Post by frostmatthew »

robert_tweed wrote: post #62
daigoba66 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't base your entire business on another business' product. That is a terrible generalization. That pretty much covers every ISV ever. And large companies like Microsoft, Google, and Apple all have a history of "Embrace, extend, and extinguish" when it comes to closing out 3rd parties. However I think your point is valid for companies like Twitter, and to a slightly lesser extent Facebook. These companies don't h…

Indeed, the obvious counter-example to that lesson is imgur.

> Indeed, the obvious counter-example to that lesson is imgur.

Is that actually a good counter-example? Are they profitable? If so, would that continue to be the case if reddit began prohibiting linking to imgur?

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#132

Post by jonknee »

There's more to this story... If I had to guess I would say that it's no longer profitable (or at least, very profitable as it once was) and it's not fun to run an image host (imagine all the trouble that comes with just copyright issues, let alone criminal matters). The founder also has a new startup called Pingly which I'm sure is more rewarding to be working on.

On its face Twitpic is shutting down because they won't get their trademark, but they've never had their trademark and have had no problems operating. Twitter isn't suing them, they're just saying they are against the trademark application. They don't need the trademark and it's bizarre to shut your company down for the possibility of being forced to change your name in the future.

If Twitpic wanted to continue running they could without any changes or extra work. It's a dead end though, Twitter has its own image service and there is little reason besides legacy to use Twitpic. Here's their traffic situation which should pretty well mirror revenue as it's web based advertising paying the bills:

https://www.quantcast.com/twitpic.com

They're hemorrhaging traffic. Globally there were 85,043,992 visits in the month period a year ago compared to 13,315,016 in the most recent month. That's also just the past year, Twitpic has been on the decline for years and peaked in July 2011 with a cool 280,021,248 visits.

Expenses are likely not down nearly the same amount as they have to store more and more images every month (with less traffic there is less bandwidth, but this doesn't count images not loaded on their website).

Just in the last month they lost 46% compared to the previous period. It's falling off a cliff. This seems like a good way to get some sympathy on the way out. A rude move to their users though. Maybe Twitter can step in and offer a bottom dollar buyout so that the links don't break.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#133

Post by toomuchtodo »

sp332 wrote: post #87
toomuchtodo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shoutout to Jason and #archiveteam. Great work on Fotopedia, ready to launch DO instances to go grab Twitpic!

I didn't mean to leave out credit to Archive Team :) But last I checked they don't need more help, whereas most of the data they grab ends up on the Internet Archive who really could use the money.

> whereas most of the data they grab ends up on the Internet Archive who really could use the money.

Completely agreed. The IA is a treasure, an underfunded one at that.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#134

Post by e12e »

jonknee wrote: post #132

There's more to this story... If I had to guess I would say that it's no longer profitable (or at least, very profitable as it once was) and it's not fun to run an image host (imagine all the trouble that comes with just copyright issues, let alone criminal matters). The founder also has a new startup called Pingly which I'm sure is more rewarding to be working on. On its face Twitpic is shutting down because they wo…

This echoes my thoughts when I read the post. Sounds like a clasdic case of simple cloud service losing profitability; answer shut down and screw your users. Afaik the service was free, so I don't have much sympathy for the users; but blaming twitter seems disingenuous.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#135

Post by valarauca1 »

LukeB_UK wrote: post #107
valarauca1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it has not succeeded. Most of users base browses the sites "Viral" gallery. Which is nothing more then a "Reddit's 24 hour greatest hits", a surprisingly low number of images make it into imgur's gallery from imgur itself. TL;DR No reddit, no front page content on imgur.

Except there's quite a bit of content there that's not from reddit.

There isn't. User submitted is horrible. Most of the sites visitors are people uploading/sharing images normally via direct linking.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#136

Post by valarauca1 »

atomicUpdate wrote: post #109
valarauca1 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet it has not succeeded. Most of users base browses the sites "Viral" gallery. Which is nothing more then a "Reddit's 24 hour greatest hits", a surprisingly low number of images make it into imgur's gallery from imgur itself. TL;DR No reddit, no front page content on imgur.

> TL;DR No reddit, no front page content on imgur. With the number of image macro posts that are on the reddit front page at any given point, I'd say their relationship is pretty symbiotic. Without imgur, I'd argue that reddit loses a significant number of their highest viewed posts, and vice-versa. Reddit would certainly have content in their smaller subreddits, but their largest ones (AdviceAnimals, funny, pics, et…

Reddit can live without imgur, and has lived without imgur. Its imgur who still needs reddit.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#137

Post by kijin »

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…

Since when does Twitter care what you tweeted last year, or even last month? Faithfully archiving your online history has never been a priority for them. The entire platform is focused on showing you what's happening right now, and they deliberately make it difficult to find older tweets without knowing the exact ID or running some sort of crawler.

We could go on a long rant about whether or not we should trust our data to cloud-based third-party services, and so on and so forth; but in the case of Twitter, they're not even trying. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they went ahead and announced that they would delete every tweet that is over X months or Y years old.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#138

Post by CCs »

Damin0u wrote: post #76

So it's time to try this backup tool https://github.com/Stantheman/Twitpic-Backup

Thanks! It's a straight forward shell script using wget. It just needs twitter handle and working folder name, downloads everything.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#139

Post by hugs »

edent wrote: post #52

A year ago I wrote a quick Python script to export all my images. If anyone wants to use it (or improve on it) I blogged about it at http://shkspr.mobi/blog/2013/08/exporting-twitpic-images-pyt...

THANK YOU!!!! I just used a modified version of your script to download all my data. Again, THANK YOU!!!

My version: https://gist.github.com/hugs/fa7892da03ce660c212e

Changes:

  * Use the short_id as the image filename.
  * Use https instead of http when downloading the json data.
  * Save the json data to individiual "page-*.json" files.
Quick question: Is it okay to use the MIT license for this?

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#140

Post by skeletonjelly »

valarauca1 wrote: post #136
atomicUpdate wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TL;DR No reddit, no front page content on imgur. With the number of image macro posts that are on the reddit front page at any given point, I'd say their relationship is pretty symbiotic. Without imgur, I'd argue that reddit loses a significant number of their highest viewed posts, and vice-versa. Reddit would certainly have content in their smaller subreddits, but their largest ones (AdviceAnimals, funny, pics, et…

Reddit can live without imgur, and has lived without imgur. Its imgur who still needs reddit.

Not since the site exploded in numbers. I'd wager someone else will take up the challenge though, just like Alan did.
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