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Twitpic is shutting down

blog.twitpic.com

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Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#101

Post by MAGZine »

u124556 wrote: post #50
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…

>Its basically like a URL shortener shutting down Did anything major happened after some of the early URL shorteners died? We survived just fine.

This is more akin to bit.ly shutting down imo.

Yes, we "survive," but that's a pretty lame measurement of the impact. URL shorteners leave a bevy of broken links everywhere, linking to content that is now lost somewhere on the net, twitpic's departure leaves use with a big hole of the social web empty. Thousands of tweets are now without context.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#102

Post by valarauca1 »

billmalarky wrote: post #95
robert_tweed wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imgur has taken clear steps to hedge itself from its dependency on reddit though.

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.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#103

Post by mrjatx »

After having both Lightbox7 and whatever Sonys big photo-store/share platform close down and wipe out my high school/college albums I've learned to definitely not rely on any image hosting services.

Back then there wasn't twitter or any other good social media and you found things out by visiting the site or through ICQ.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#104

Post by abootstrapper »

pionar wrote: post #28

Two lessons: 1. Don't base your entire business on another business' product. Especially one that has had such a hostile relationship with third parties. When the other business decides to discontinue your access to its service, or otherwise change things, or basically copy what you do under their own brand, you're screwed. 2. Don't create a similar name that will give you trouble in trademark disputes. (Seriously? T…

1) What if I told you, you could base your entire business on another business' product, get shut down, and still come out ahead? Getting shut down isn't the worst thing to happen, it could even be the "exit strategy." Run the money machine until it's dry.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#105

Post by TheLoneWolfling »

runarb wrote: post #33

Hopefully somone like the Archive Team will at least manage to save most of the images. Urls used for images and links seems to be sequential numbers.

I just really hope that no-where in the shutdown does twitpic put up a restrictive robots.txt. Archive.org's retroactive robots.txt and all that.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#106

Post by boomzilla »

jenius wrote: post #36
OzzyB wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Twitpic homepage[1] is also 404'ing big time, perhaps it's just a devops issue more than them pulling the plug before the sunset date? It almost seems like they're playing a little hardball and showing everyone what things will be like if they disappeared from the web, which seems to be what Twitter is threatening them with since they're unable to secure the use of their name and yet millions of images are linked…

> Twitter doesn't give a fuck about developers now that they have sufficiently used them to build their platform and brand. I really hate that this is the standard model for building startups these days. Make a free service, grow your userbase using investment money and by encouraging developers to build on your platform, then once users and developers are dependent on the platform, start littering it with ads, selli…

I'd say it's more the shortsightedness of the developers who build on others' platform. It's OK to tag on but you've got to make sure that your core value prop is not a value added feature to that platform. Twitpic could have branched to something else 2-3 years ago, but they did not, and as a result, is eliminated from the game.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#107

Post by LukeB_UK »

valarauca1 wrote: post #102
billmalarky wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur has taken clear steps to hedge itself from its dependency on reddit though.

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.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#108

Post by Cabal »

mseebach wrote: post #84
pionar wrote: post #28

Two lessons: 1. Don't base your entire business on another business' product. Especially one that has had such a hostile relationship with third parties. When the other business decides to discontinue your access to its service, or otherwise change things, or basically copy what you do under their own brand, you're screwed. 2. Don't create a similar name that will give you trouble in trademark disputes. (Seriously? T…

1 should rather be "don't build your business on being an obvious missing feature from another product, especially such that if the product implements that feature, they make you irrelevant overnight" with 1a: "if you do, understand that your business' potential exists entirely in the short term".

It worked out fairly well for Rapportive:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/07/linkedin-picks-up-rapportiv...

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#109

Post by atomicUpdate »

valarauca1 wrote: post #102
billmalarky wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imgur has taken clear steps to hedge itself from its dependency on reddit though.

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, etc.) would be ghost towns without imgur.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#110

Post by LukeB_UK »

josefresco wrote: post #68
driverdan wrote: post #25

I suspect Twitter's demand is the straw that broke the camel's back. I'm sure Twitpic use has declined significantly since Twitter introduced their own image hosting. The team has moved on to other projects so there's not much incentive to fight it.

Pretty big straw... Not many fully functional and profitable companies can handle a "Drop your trademark or we'll sue" legal demand from a company like Twitter.

Except they're not threatening to sue, they're threatening to drop TwitPic from their API.
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