The saga of Twitpic’s on-again, off-again, on-again demise is apparently over.
On Saturday, the day the plug was supposed to be pulled on the photo sharing service, Twitpic founder Noah Everett announced on his blog that he had reached an agreement with Twitter to take over the domain and photo archive and continue to display photos and links on photos “for the time being.”
That’s good news for longtime users of Twitter, many of whom used Twitpic as their go-to photo sharing tool before Twitter started hosting photos on its own servers in 2011. Historians should also be happy that iconic news events captured with Twitpic photos — like the U.S. Airways jet that landed on the Hudson River in 2009 — won’t be deleted.
So ends a will-it-or-won’t-it-survive story that started in September when Everett said he was forced to shutter the service because of a trademark dispute with Twitter. Later an acquisition by a mystery buyer was floated, before another plug-pulling message.
So Twitpic lives on in read-only form. Users can still login to their profiles to delete content, delete their account or download their data but they no longer will be able to upload photos. The iOS and Android apps have been removed from the app stores.
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