Just a week after Twitpic was supposed to close shop, the image sharing service announced that it has been acquired and will stay open for business as usual.
In a message shared to Twitpic followers on Twitter on Sept. 18, Twitpic said that the six-year-old company has been acquired and will live on. No details were shared as to who purchased Twitpic and for how much, but Twitpic promised to disclose more information later on.
We're happy to announce we've been acquired and Twitpic will live on! We will post more details as we can disclose them
— TwitPic (@TwitPic) September 18, 2014
Earlier this month, Twitpic founder Noah Everett announced that Twitpic was shutting down as the result of a losing trademark battle with Twitter, which was calling on the company to give up its trademark or risk losing access to Twitter's application programming interface, the tools that allow Twitpic and other third-party developers to create apps on Twitter's platform.
"This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009," said Everett at that time.
A Twitter spokesperson, however, made it clear that Twitter did not want Twitpic to stop using its name, only to relinquish its trademark application. When news of Twitpic shutting down reached Twitter, the spokesperson said Twitter is "sad to see Twitpic is shutting down."
"We encourage developers to build on top of Twitter service, as Twitpic has done for years, and we made it clear that they could operate using the Twitpic name," Twitter said. "Of course, we also have to protect our brand, and that includes trademarks tied to the brand."
Long before Twitter started allowing users to share images hosted on its own servers, Twitpic was already ahead of the game. Since Twitpic was launched in 2008, it has become a platform for citizen journalism, hosting photos of newsworthy events taken by private citizens. In 2009, for instance, the first photos of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 that crashed into the Hudson River for all of Manhattan to see surfaced not on The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal but on Twitpic.
"We haven't gotten so much press coverage before," said Everett at that time. The company was one-year-old when the Hudson River plane crash photo crashed Twitpic's servers. "It's shocking, and it's a good feeling -- though (also) not a good feeling because it's bad news."
Now that Twitter allows users to share their photos more easily, Twitpic has become less relevant, although it is still the only photo sharing service that lets users share animated GIFs to feed readers such as TweetDeck.
