Twitpic

» see twitpic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

twitpic urls were everywhere in my feed without me uploading to it. i opened twitter in '09 like everyone else and clicked through twitpic links for years without ever posting anything. the service was a separate company doing what twitter should have shipped on day one, and for six years it had a near-monopoly on the role. when twitter finally added native photo upload in '11, twitpic started its long decline.

this is mostly told from the news pages. noah everett, a former military it guy, launched twitpic on 13 february '08 from his bedroom. the api was the simplest possible mvp. you uploaded a photo and tweeted the short url it returned. by january '10 it was serving 2.3 million users. the service was profitable on banner ads alone, which made it an unusual one-developer story (close enough).

twitter shipped native photo upload in august '11 in partnership with photobucket. honestly that was the death notice on slow burn. twitpic's share of twitter image traffic kept falling. by '14 everett wanted to trademark the name. twitter said no and threatened to revoke api access. on september 4 '14 everett posted a closure announcement. a vague would-be acquirer surfaced on september 18, then fell through in october. twitter ended up taking the brand and the archive on october 25 '14 to keep the urls alive.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

the iran election photos in june '09 went around the world as twitpic links. the us airways flight 1549 photo by janis krums, the one of passengers standing on the wing of the plane in the hudson river, was uploaded to twitpic in january '09 and became the defining image of the event. anyway, twitpic was the photo-distribution layer for twitter as a news source during the years when twitter was first being read as a news source.

~ the postmortem ~

the trademark fight was the trigger and the obituary at the same time. everett had filed for a twitpic trademark in '09. twitter contested it, on the grounds that twit- prefix and -pic together were too close to twitter's own brand language. twitter informed everett in mid '14 that api access would be revoked unless he withdrew the application. that was the leverage point. the closure announcement followed within weeks.

~ what got buried with it ~

the archive nominally still lives at twitpic.com under twitter's hand. in practice many links rotted across the various twitter ownership changes after '22. the canonical twitter photos of the 2009-2014 era, all that journalism captured by phones held over crowds, lived on twitpic urls that often no longer resolve. you can still find the hudson river photo. plenty of the smaller history did not survive the silent decay.

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