Photo-sharing service TwitPic is shutting down — for real this time.
If you're not familiar with the story, TwitPic announced in early September it would be closing down due to a trademark dispute with Twitter.
But in mid-September, things seemed to be looking up. TwitPic tweeted an announcement it had been acquired and would continue to operate.
Beyond lots of headlines about a "mysterious" company, no one's quite sure who allegedly swooped in to save TwitPic from shuttering the service.
Now, because "agreeable terms could not be met," TwitPic says it will officially, officially shut down on October 25. The blog post announcing the shuttering points users to a link where they can download their photos.
The company, which was launched in 2008 by Noah Everett, actually predated Twitter's own photo-sharing services.
A writer for CNET credits the service's ongoing popularity to citizen journalism in the days before Twitter was able to upload and share photos. Particularly this photo of the Hudson River plane crash, which crashed the site due to its popularity.
Still, while there might be a certain level of nostalgia tied to the service, maybe we shouldn't be all that surprised by the shuttering.
As a writer for Marketing Land notes, Twitter hasn't exactly been too kind to third-party photo-sharing services. In 2012, the official Twitter app shucked third-party photo uploads. The message was loud and clear: if you want to upload photos to Twitter, you're going to have to use Twitter to do it. (Video via Twitter)
And yet, Twitter itself issued a statement to several outlets after news of TwitPic's shuttering saying it was "sad to see [the service] is shutting down." Twitter said, despite that, it had to protect its brand and "trademarks tied to the brand."
