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Twitpic is shutting down

blog.twitpic.com

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Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#71

Post by zem »

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…

i'd go further and say don't waste a second of your precious time and energy developing for someone else's closed platform. the sharecropping metaphor has only gained in relevance since tim bray first proposed it.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#72

Post by treehau5 »

dlsym wrote: post #39

> "A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark" Guess it's time to abandon Twitter.

Twitter has basically lost all my loyalty because of actions against the developers that made them who they are.

Whatever the reasons may be, or even if Twitter is "on the right side of the law" I would rather see them embrace this entrepreneurship than go the route of the bigger tech companies and squash any bit of choice. Typically people use third party add-ons because they enhance the experience. What would twitter be like if they banned all the third party services that convert longer messages and post a shortened version on twitter? I can imagine a similar scenario if, for example, reddit decided all of a sudden to threaten the creator of "reddit enhancement suite" or if they decided to shutdown Imgur, which I think that symbiotic relationship was already mentioned here.

Time to look for alternatives.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#74

Post by bambax »

pchristensen wrote: post #61
bambax wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you, but for the use of the word "dependent". What user is dependent on Twitter? Seriously? Can't one stop tweeting in an instant without any ill effect on her life? For developers it's a different story -- but they should know better.

Aside from people with huge audiences and Twitter-related businesses, anything you choose to use and incorporate into your life is at least somewhat of a dependency, even in the presence of substitutes. For example, I love Chick-fil-A sandwiches. When I moved, the closest Chick-fil-A is now far away. I was dependent on Chick-fil-A, and I'm less happy without it, even though I have missed no meals and probably eaten h…

If words have meaning and if we try to stay away from hyperbole, you are not dependent on Chick-fil-A, never have been, never will be.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#75

Post by korzun »

nilved wrote: post #56

It's a shame Twitter has become so developer-hostile. When it first came out, I remember the excitement of using Twitter as a host platform for other apps. Now I couldn't imagine writing a line of code that interacts with their platform. It's a nightmare. I wish app.net had been more successful: it was clearly an attempt to ride the waves of that excitement after it'd been made clear that Twitter had jumped the shark…

> It's a shame Twitter has become so developer-hostile

Nothing about this is developer hostile. I'm rather surprised this did not happen sooner.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#77

Post by jmspring »

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…

Over the years I have talked to a few companies (large and small) that wanted to move forward on a platform yet maintain some legacy cruft...aka sustaining engineering. I partially declined these companies at the risk of them hiring new and then the stuff you work on you maintain for it's lifetime...but that's another story.

That said, I am curious if there is a business model being missed here. Essentially for twit pic and similar, buying up/sustaining the content and trying to figure out how to get some value out of it.

Another option would be for companies like twitter to offer a mechanism where twit pic/etc content could be snarfed up by the internet archive and when a company goes away, somehow the links to content get redirected.

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#79

Post by toomuchtodo »

sp332 wrote: post #66

Here's a reminder to please donate to the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/donate/index.php They have tons of old twitpic pages! http://web.archive.org/web/20140304234132/http://twitpic.com... See that timeline at the top? You can go to any date and browse around. And the Internet Archive is more than just the "Wayback Machine" that lets you browse old versions of websites. They have massive datasets of video, a…

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

Re: Twitpic is shutting down

#80

Post by larrys »

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…

"Don't base your entire business on another business' product. "

Well another angle to that could be it's ok if you plan on getting out while the going is good by selling to a greater fool.

This is one of the detriments in life to knowing to much. You tend to shy away from things (because of past knowledge and experience) that someone with less experience might do. And they might, by luck, make out.

For example if you operate in old school business the idea of going forward with an idea not knowing how you will make money simply doesn't make sense. But hey people have done that and they've made out.

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