Twitpic can't even make a graceful exit. The photo-sharing service that has built its six-year-old business on Twitter is closing up shop after all.
Earlier this year, Twitpic announced that it is closing down because it is too small to go up against micro-blogging platform Twitter in a trademark battle. The service was initially set to shut down on Sept. 25. However, just days after its scheduled demise, Twitpic founder Noah Everett took to his company's blog to announce that Twitpic found a buyer that is willing to provide a new home for Twitpic. Unfortunately, that buyer, whom we never got to know at all, seems to have backtracked.
"It's with a heavy heart that I announce again that Twitpic will be shutting down on Oct. 25," says Everett in his blog post. "We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options."
Everett explains his earlier announcement that Twitpic was getting a second chance at life, saying he was excited to let Twitpic users know that the service was living on. He did not disclose details about any potential buyers but he says Twitpic and the mysterious buyer were unable to meet in the middle.
"We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met," Everett says. "Normally we wouldn't announce something like that prematurely but we were hoping to let our customers know as soon as possible that Twitpic was living on."
Twitpic was established as a third-party photo-sharing service for Twitter back in 2008, when Twitter had no native option that allowed users to post images. The service allowed users to upload images to their Twitpic accounts and post a link to the image to share it with their Twitter followers. Twitpic quickly became a platform for citizen journalism on Twitter, allowing users to take photos of newsworthy events and share them on Twitter even before the mainstream media outlets begin covering the stories. A prominent example of this was the Hudson River plane crash in 2009, which was first reported on Twitter via Twitpic.
However, as Twitter began rolling out support for photos and images, Twitpic became largely irrelevant. Instead of expanding to other platforms, Twitpic chose to remain exclusive to Twitter.
When Everett first announced that Twitpic was shutting down, he said it was because Twitter contacted him telling Twitpic to abandon its trademark or risk losing access to Twitter's application programming interface, which, of course, is the foundation of Twitpic's entire business.
