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Seeing as they're shutting down the company/service in a week, they're probably out of cash. While it sucks for your customers, that's what happens when you run
by djloche 12y ago
Seeing as they're shutting down the company/service in a week, they're probably out of cash. While it sucks for your customers, that's what happens when you run out of money. It sucks for everyone. I'm guessing they were floating the company on personal funds in hopes the acquisition would go through, but it did not - so now they're doing everything they can to stop this turning into a personal financial bloodbath from the bandwidth costs spiral due to everyone rushing to get their photos before the shutdown.
Just an ugly situation for everyone.
- eropple 12y agoThey're straight-up refusing to talk to Jason about giving Archive Team a data dump. There's an ugly situation, but only one side is precipitating it.
- billmalarky 12y agoMaybe they are holding out that someone will purchase still? They lose all their value the second the archive team gets all their data right? Edit: On second thought, I agree that it's probably related to the bandwidth cost.
- click170 12y agoSneakernet could be a cost effective option especially for large volumes of data, and its often overlooked. I wonder if the Archive Team has considered sending twitpic a hard drive and asking them to just rsync the data over? Edit: This assumes that they keep backups of said data outside of EC2. Walking a hard drive over to your local Amazon DC.. won't quite work.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoAmazon will provide drives for their export feature. People have already offered to foot the bill to have it done.
- stevencorona 12y agoThere are hundreds of TBs of data.
- sp332 12y agoIt's not about cost. AT members and Dustin Curtis have offered to pay for it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472998 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sp332 12y agoTrue, but this isn't the first time AT has offered. It's not the first time Noah Everett has gone radio silent either.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- sp332 12y agohttps://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512041630816555008 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512041630816555008 and https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512040672527138816 https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/512040672527138816
- lalwanivikas 12y agoHere's a solution: https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562 https://twitter.com/dcurtis/status/523215681412546562 Dustin Curtis: "Can anyone put me in touch with the founder of Twitpic?(I'll pay to backup all of the photos, and even host them. Ridiculous situation.)"
- dcurtis 12y agoThis Noah guy (the founder) is really hard to get in contact with. If anyone can make an intro--hi@dustincurtis.com
- RexRollman 12y agoWhy are people worrying about backups? Certainly people had no expectation of recoverability of photos hosted on a free service? Or was TwitPic promising that?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- eropple 12y agoI realize there's some harshness to it, but you make implicit promises when you set up a public service. Twitpic chose to make themselves an important part of the Twitter ecosystem, and they have a moral obligation to not be assholes when they need to close up shop. Not getting with Jason and the rest of archiveteam very much falls under "assholes" in my book, especially when other people are offering to pay for the data you're happy to destroy.
- runamok 12y agoI may be speaking out of turn but wouldn't this be an object lesson of 'if you like something, pay for it'? Going out of business hurts everyone and frankly I think it's OK for customers to share some of that pain. I honestly am not familiar with their revenue model so perhaps that is not apropos though. I do see the sadness of all that bitrot though so I understand your point of view.
- ObviousScience 12y agoWhy should your users be unable to pay you to back up their data just because you failed at business and now have to stop your service? That's the epitome of petty spite.
- j4kp07 12y agoBecause he's not in the data recovery business. And who are you to tell him how to run his life and his career path? What moron has been using their service for years and for free without a contingency plan? What idiot/geek/nerd in today's world doesn't keep triplicate backups of important data? Hell, I keep encrypted backups at home AND in the cloud/offsite. Just because you failed at LIFE and protecting your assets does not mean the next person is being petty or owes you a favor.
- downandout 12y agoYeah, I think they just don't want or can't pay for the bandwidth. Or, perhaps they are trying to make Twitter feel bad and buy them. Either way it's a bad situation, but isn't necessarily evil on their part to not want to put anything more into a dying venture.
- downandout 12y agoFor those downvoting this - why don't you try paying for 800M images to be leached from the server of a failed company of yours with no hope of recouping a single dollar.
- jamesbrownuhh 12y agoAny such cost would be several orders of magnitude smaller than the millions of dollars of advertising revenue those images have been pulling in for twitpic over the years. Let's not pretend that Noah is down to his last packet of ramen noodles, here. Twitpic is a long way from being a "failed company" by any reasonable definition of the term.
- Mithaldu 12y agoYou're getting downvoted because you somehow missed that multiple people have offered to carry the cost of export from S3.
- downandout 12y agoRandom people from the Internet offering to pay a bill likely to be in the low five figures. That sounds like it would work out well. "I sent him a copy of the bill and he's not responding. I don't understand.....he said he would pay. He even gave me his Twitter handle!"
- jamesbrownuhh 12y agoThose "random people from the Internet" you are dismissing include a number of well-respected site owners, operators, and entrepreneurs.