7 ms·

I am pretty sure these guys are a little crazy - they said Twitter was crushing their brand and they had no resources, then wouldn't let their users export thei

by owenwil 12y ago

I am pretty sure these guys are a little crazy - they said Twitter was crushing their brand and they had no resources, then wouldn't let their users export their photos and now are being acquired. Something fishy is going on.

IanDrake 12y ago
To me this seemed like a good strategy to force twitter to buy them.
- Aldo_MX 12y ago
  They didn't say that Twitter bought them...
LeoPanthera 12y ago
> then wouldn't let their users export their photos Huh? They said they would be implementing an export function, have in fact now done so. It can be found here, at the bottom of the page: http://twitpic.com/account/settings http://twitpic.com/account/settings
- makomk 12y ago
  I'm not sure whether anyone managed to get that to actually work. People were complaining it never gave them an archive they could download.
  - LeoPanthera 12y ago
    I clicked the button about 24 hours ago, and just got my photos now. It's slow, but it works.
- kevincrane 12y ago
  From a few days ago: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512042070861950976 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512042070861950976
  - Mithrandir 12y ago
    There's also this: https://twitter.com/paix120/status/512087509799825408 https://twitter.com/paix120/status/512087509799825408
  - shouldbeworking 12y ago
    OP said they "wouldn't let their users export their photos" which is different from archiving other users' photos. It is an issue but it's a different issue IMO. I don't think that pretending it's the same issue helps.
- Touche 12y ago
  TwitPic has gone out of their way for years to make it difficult to get your pictures out. Some services were created to try and make it easy to move your pictures to another provider and TwitPic always blocked it. They said that people could export one at a time manually only.
  - scholia 12y ago
    Why would you want to get your pictures out? If you uploaded them, then you already have the originals. If you uploaded them, watched them get reduced to a very small size, then deleted your originals then you're an idiot. Twitpic is not and never has been a photo storage service. It was/is a service for adding pics to tweets. That's all. It doesn't make any sense to move them to another provider: the Twitpic addresses are already included in the tweets and Twitter isn't going to change those to different URLs.
    - lmz 12y ago
      Are there no cases where a Twitter client takes a picture and immediately uploads it to Twitpic, without keeping a local copy?
      - wldcordeiro 12y ago
        Or those rare cases where people upload it on a device they no longer own.
        scholia 12y ago
        So, these are people who take photos on device and then dispose of said device without even backing it up or copying their pictures to some form of long term storage? Since Twitpic's purpose was to post photos inline at Twitter, what proportion of their photos have they probably lost? Given that they can't even cope with the idea of copying their pics off this old device, what are the odds that they can cope with the idea of downloading an archive from Twitpic? I'm all in favor of companies letting you take your data out of any service you've used, on principle, but frankly, this scenario doesn't make a lot of sense.
- motdiem 12y ago
  Having actually worked to implement a last minute export feature, I can attest that they went out of their way to make it difficult - with weird restrictions, and no responsiveness on API rate limiting - I'm glad they'll live on, but I do feel they definitely have some trust to regain...
maxmcd 12y ago
Fishy? Their post generated a lot of attention and certainly attracted acquisition offers. This could have been intentional or not, but unless they have some hard-and-fast reason not to sell this doesn't seem like the most unlikely outcome.
- jonknee 12y ago
  The fishy part is that they were shutting down for a phony reason. They never had a trademark, so it made no sense to shut down the company when they ended up not getting one. Twitter wasn't suing them or cutting off API access, they were just against the trademark. Coincidentally (perhaps), the service was hemorrhaging users while storage costs remained pretty constant. If they wanted to soldier on and continue the service there was absolutely nothing stopping them. It smells like a big scare tactic to put the mess on someone else's plate. It worked I guess.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - eridius 12y ago
    The most likely explanation, which was suggested by someone else but unfortunately I forget who, is that the founder of TwitPic was simply tired of dealing with Twitter and their increasingly-hostile stance towards third-party developers (even though in this case it's a service and not a client). This trademark thing may have just been the final straw. And in light of that, being acquired makes perfect sense as it means the founder still gets to stop dealing with Twitter and let the new owners deal with them now.
    - jonknee 12y ago
      I think he's already made the money (it used to be waaay bigger and make a ton more) and now wants to work on his new startup. Blaming Twitter for the trademark app was just a really easy excuse. Being able to call it an acquisition is even better.
brk 12y ago
then wouldn't let their users export their photos I understand the fundamental argument here, but were people really thinking that twitpic was some kind of online image archive? Are there lots of people operating on the assumption that twitpic was going to be forever available and available as an image catalog? I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. Berating twitpic for not having an export seems a little bit odd to me.
- untog 12y ago
  It's not really people using it as their own personal archive, it's that it is an online archive as a whole. I believe some people were trying to archive all the photos contained in TwitPic but were getting blocked.
  - nwh 12y ago
    That's correct. Archive Team was working on it but their crawlers got banned. TwitPic said something along the lines of them having a better solution, which I suppose was this.
- danieldk 12y ago
  I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. Indeed, and for that reason it's a shame why only few services allow seamless synchronization. Apparently, you can show Google Drive photos in Google Plus, but not with an Apps account (which I have). Dropbox currently comes closest: I can add photos from files/folders to Dropbox photo albums. This is really the nicest way of photo sharing: I can just copy a photo to my Dropbox folder, share it in an album as in Flickr. My local Dropbox folder is backed up through time machine, etc. Of course, Dropbox' album functionality is currently severely limited. I'd really like to see them expand it, or Google to make their service smoother and generally available, or some startup that makes photo albums from your Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive folders.
  - scholia 12y ago
    I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. These are really not the same types of service. * Twitpic was for posting photos incline on Twitter in the days before Twitter added that feature. This is a very specific function: it's not a photo storage site, and never has been. * Imgur was originally for sharing photos on reddit, but not inline: you go to Imgur to view them. But there's no guarantee that your photos won't be deleted for one reason or another (as the celebrity nudes were deleted). * Facebook is for sharing photos with friends. There's every expectation that they'll be available as long as you have a Facebook account, and you can download them. However, there's no guarantee that your original photos will be saved in their original resolution. Again, it's not an archival back-up site. They are different sites, set up to provide different functions.

by owenwil 12y ago

IanDrake 12y ago

To me this seemed like a good strategy to force twitter to buy them.

Aldo_MX 12y ago
They didn't say that Twitter bought them...

LeoPanthera 12y ago

> then wouldn't let their users export their photos Huh? They said they would be implementing an export function, have in fact now done so. It can be found here, at the bottom of the page: http://twitpic.com/account/settings http://twitpic.com/account/settings

makomk 12y ago
I'm not sure whether anyone managed to get that to actually work. People were complaining it never gave them an archive they could download.
- LeoPanthera 12y ago
  I clicked the button about 24 hours ago, and just got my photos now. It's slow, but it works.
kevincrane 12y ago
From a few days ago: https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512042070861950976 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512042070861950976
- Mithrandir 12y ago
  There's also this: https://twitter.com/paix120/status/512087509799825408 https://twitter.com/paix120/status/512087509799825408
- shouldbeworking 12y ago
  OP said they "wouldn't let their users export their photos" which is different from archiving other users' photos. It is an issue but it's a different issue IMO. I don't think that pretending it's the same issue helps.
Touche 12y ago
TwitPic has gone out of their way for years to make it difficult to get your pictures out. Some services were created to try and make it easy to move your pictures to another provider and TwitPic always blocked it. They said that people could export one at a time manually only.
- scholia 12y ago
  Why would you want to get your pictures out? If you uploaded them, then you already have the originals. If you uploaded them, watched them get reduced to a very small size, then deleted your originals then you're an idiot. Twitpic is not and never has been a photo storage service. It was/is a service for adding pics to tweets. That's all. It doesn't make any sense to move them to another provider: the Twitpic addresses are already included in the tweets and Twitter isn't going to change those to different URLs.
  - lmz 12y ago
    Are there no cases where a Twitter client takes a picture and immediately uploads it to Twitpic, without keeping a local copy?
    - wldcordeiro 12y ago
      Or those rare cases where people upload it on a device they no longer own.
      - scholia 12y ago
        So, these are people who take photos on device and then dispose of said device without even backing it up or copying their pictures to some form of long term storage? Since Twitpic's purpose was to post photos inline at Twitter, what proportion of their photos have they probably lost? Given that they can't even cope with the idea of copying their pics off this old device, what are the odds that they can cope with the idea of downloading an archive from Twitpic? I'm all in favor of companies letting you take your data out of any service you've used, on principle, but frankly, this scenario doesn't make a lot of sense.
motdiem 12y ago
Having actually worked to implement a last minute export feature, I can attest that they went out of their way to make it difficult - with weird restrictions, and no responsiveness on API rate limiting - I'm glad they'll live on, but I do feel they definitely have some trust to regain...

maxmcd 12y ago

Fishy? Their post generated a lot of attention and certainly attracted acquisition offers. This could have been intentional or not, but unless they have some hard-and-fast reason not to sell this doesn't seem like the most unlikely outcome.

jonknee 12y ago
The fishy part is that they were shutting down for a phony reason. They never had a trademark, so it made no sense to shut down the company when they ended up not getting one. Twitter wasn't suing them or cutting off API access, they were just against the trademark. Coincidentally (perhaps), the service was hemorrhaging users while storage costs remained pretty constant. If they wanted to soldier on and continue the service there was absolutely nothing stopping them. It smells like a big scare tactic to put the mess on someone else's plate. It worked I guess.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eridius 12y ago
  The most likely explanation, which was suggested by someone else but unfortunately I forget who, is that the founder of TwitPic was simply tired of dealing with Twitter and their increasingly-hostile stance towards third-party developers (even though in this case it's a service and not a client). This trademark thing may have just been the final straw. And in light of that, being acquired makes perfect sense as it means the founder still gets to stop dealing with Twitter and let the new owners deal with them now.
  - jonknee 12y ago
    I think he's already made the money (it used to be waaay bigger and make a ton more) and now wants to work on his new startup. Blaming Twitter for the trademark app was just a really easy excuse. Being able to call it an acquisition is even better.

brk 12y ago

then wouldn't let their users export their photos I understand the fundamental argument here, but were people really thinking that twitpic was some kind of online image archive? Are there lots of people operating on the assumption that twitpic was going to be forever available and available as an image catalog? I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. Berating twitpic for not having an export seems a little bit odd to me.

untog 12y ago
It's not really people using it as their own personal archive, it's that it is an online archive as a whole. I believe some people were trying to archive all the photos contained in TwitPic but were getting blocked.
- nwh 12y ago
  That's correct. Archive Team was working on it but their crawlers got banned. TwitPic said something along the lines of them having a better solution, which I suppose was this.
danieldk 12y ago
I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. Indeed, and for that reason it's a shame why only few services allow seamless synchronization. Apparently, you can show Google Drive photos in Google Plus, but not with an Apps account (which I have). Dropbox currently comes closest: I can add photos from files/folders to Dropbox photo albums. This is really the nicest way of photo sharing: I can just copy a photo to my Dropbox folder, share it in an album as in Flickr. My local Dropbox folder is backed up through time machine, etc. Of course, Dropbox' album functionality is currently severely limited. I'd really like to see them expand it, or Google to make their service smoother and generally available, or some startup that makes photo albums from your Dropbox/Drive/OneDrive folders.
- scholia 12y ago
  I see twitpic, imgur, Facebook, and even services like flickr as temporary methods to share photos online. These are really not the same types of service. * Twitpic was for posting photos incline on Twitter in the days before Twitter added that feature. This is a very specific function: it's not a photo storage site, and never has been. * Imgur was originally for sharing photos on reddit, but not inline: you go to Imgur to view them. But there's no guarantee that your photos won't be deleted for one reason or another (as the celebrity nudes were deleted). * Facebook is for sharing photos with friends. There's every expectation that they'll be available as long as you have a Facebook account, and you can download them. However, there's no guarantee that your original photos will be saved in their original resolution. Again, it's not an archival back-up site. They are different sites, set up to provide different functions.