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Twitpic's last-minute deal with Twitter keeps your old photos safe
Twitpic may not have avoided an untimely demise, but you won't have to worry about some of your older Twitter photos disappearing into the void. The defunct hosting company has reached a last-minute deal that will have Twitter take over both the Twitpic web domain and its photo archive, keeping all those legacy images intact. It's not a revival; Twitpic is no longer taking new pictures, and all that you can do now is delete or download your collection. There's also a chance that those snapshots will go offline, since Twitpic can only promise that your library is safe "for the time being." Still, the pact will give you at least a temporary place to go when you're feeling nostalgic about that first selfie.
Unable to find a suitor, Twitpic is shutting down on October 25th
It looked like Twitpic would live on after a trademark spat with Twitter. Last month, the photo-sharing service announced that it was shutting down, and then that it had been acquired. It seems that whatever deal was on the table went south as the service is really truly shutting down on October 25th. Founder Noah Everett took to the company's blog to announce its ultimate fate, stating that "agreeable terms could not be met" after sifting through "a handful of potential acquirers." Everett also said that while the announcement that Twitpic would stay active was premature, the company felt that is was important to let its users know it would keep on trucking as soon as it could. If you need to grab your images, you can get info on exporting data and snapshots here.
Twitpic is being acquired, and apparently not shutting down next week
Good news? After a shocking announcement by Twitpic that it would close its doors as a result of action by Twitter, now the company has announced that's not shutting down after all. There are no specific details, but in a tweet, it says "We're happy to announce we've been acquired and Twitpic will live on! We will post more details as we can disclose them." Your guess is as good as ours as to the buyer, but this may explain a recent dispute that saw Twitpic founder Noah Everett blocking efforts to back up the site's pictures before they disappeared. All that matters now, is that your pre-Instagram photos are safe.
Twitter trademark turmoil forces Twitpic to shut down
It's the end of an era, folks: Twitpic, one of the first sites that let users upload and share photos to Twitter, will go dark on September 25. Unlike other shuttered startups though, Twitpic hasn't run out of cash or been pushed out of the spotlight by fierce competitors. No, its demise is all thanks to some trademark turmoil initiated by the folks at Twitter who reached out to the Twitpic team a few weeks back. The social giant wanted the company (which at one point was valued at over $10 million) to give up its nearly 5 year old trademark application or face the prospect of being shut out of the Twitter ecosystem entirely. Rather than devote gobs of time and resources to proving his point, founder Noah Everett (sadly) decided to call it quits on the operation. Don't feel too bad for him, though: he's got another startup in the works called Pingly that basically aims to build a "better Gmail". We don't want to harp on a guy who's already down on his luck but... join the club, pal. In any case, you've still got time to download all of your stored photos from Twitpic -- just give those poor folks a little time to release the tool that'll let you do it.
TwitPic launches app, way too late
TwitPic, which was the first photo sharing service for Twitter (and probably the most popular for a while, at least until competing services like Instagram stepped up) has finally released an iPhone app. It's ill-timed to say the least, considering that Twitter now has an official service (built into the official app and Apple's iOS), and several third-party apps hook into TwitPic. But if you remain a big TwitPic user, the free app is probably worth grabbing. You can manage and upload your own photos and videos, and browse others' content as well. It may be a little late, but for those still making use of TwitPic's service, this app should come in handy.
Twitpic for iPhone brings four years of image-sharing history, one year too late
Having become a staple for 35 million life-observing extroverts already, Twitpic has suddenly decided to launch itself into the world of iOS apps. You may justifiably question the point of yet another platform for sharing photos and videos over Twitter, given how well the official app, Instagram and others now handle such things. But then you'd be missing out on a community that has been steadily growing since even before mobile photography took off, and whose visual ramblings are actually much funnier and more amazing than even the brightest shots of the Dutch skyline.
Windows Phones starting to receive support for Twitter images in Pictures Hub
The "What's New" feed in Windows Phone Mango's Picture Hub has done a great job offering thumbnail images for Facebook and Windows Live messages, but for some reason lovers of Twitter pictures have been shunned, with only a link to the image being provided. Not the worst thing on the planet, of course, but certainly it's been a minor thorn in the side of frequent users of the social networking service. Reports are beginning to come in, however, that this is all changing now -- it looks as though quite a few photos originating from Twitter are now showing up, which may be an indicator of some fix-it work going on behind the scenes.
Twitter partners with Firefox, adds new image sharing tools
As TechCrunch suggested earlier in the week, Twitter announced a few new features today: improved search on hashtags and usernames, and a Twitter-branded image/video sharing service that may disrupt established players like TwitPic and yFrog (the back end for Twitter's service is provided by PhotoBucket). The photo service will be live in the next few weeks. The company also announced a partnership with Mozilla to deliver a custom version of Firefox that does Twitter search in the location bar; current FF users can get the same features via a plug-in. This upgraded suite of capabilities lines up nicely with the other TechCrunch tidbit from yesterday, suggesting that part of the image service's mission is to integrate with iOS 5. iPhone users would presumably gain a 'Send to Twitter' button in any image-enabled application, although there are hints that this might go quite a bit further. If it's part of a larger plan for shared services on iDevices, that could dramatically improve the multi-app experience for people working with different sorts of data; Richard points to this Chris Clark post from a year ago with some ideas about how that might work.
Astronaut shares amazing Twitpics from space, booze not involved
The same social media-savvy astronaut (and current ISS commander) responsible for the first Foursquare check-in from space is now using his exhibitionist skills on Twitter to share some amazing images of earth. Covering everything from the view of our blue planet outside of the Cupola of the International Space Station, to a night view of the Nile river, or morning breaking over the Andes -- it's pretty surreal stuff and definitely puts your tweets from last night's bar-hopping to shame. We're also glad to see NASA's presence on Twitter be slightly more uplifting than the long, agonizing death of the Mars Phoenix rover. To view some of the shots in question, see the gallery below, or hit the link to Douglas H. Wheelock's (a.k.a @Astro_Wheels) Twitter account to take it all in. Oh and we should also mention he accepts requests, so if there's something you really want to see let him know. %Gallery-107741%
TwitPic Find: Snow Leopard on a hackint0sh
What's better than pictures of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in the wild? How about a snapshot of Snow Leopard running on a hackint0sh? While this could be a doctored photo, it does show a Eee PC 901 netbook with several windows open on the screen. In the About This Mac window are the magic characters "Build 10A432", which all good TUAW readers should recognize as the build number for the Golden Master of Snow Leopard. Click the Read More link to see the picture.
Twitter integration for Adium in process
In a recent blog entry, Adium developer Zac West discusses the progress of integrating Twitter into the multi-service instant messaging client's already abundant offerings. "The current base of Twitter clients often leave something to be desired, behave in a weird way, or just add an additional application you need to keep open," West explains before detailing how Matt Gemmell's MGTwitterEngine is being used to provide Twitter for Adium.The concept is quite different from existing clients, but makes perfect sense for Adium. Twitter feeds can be followed or unfollowed by adding and removing them from your contact list. If you IM them, it'll send them a direct message. Your Twitter feed comes displayed in a group chat that you can keep open or closed as you need it. It's also very easy to reply to random Twitter links that you can find online. West hopes to build in additional features such as autouploading an image to TwitPic when it's dragged into an IM window. I would love for some of the additional features that are found in TweetDeck, such as TweetShrink and translation at the click of a button, to be added as well.Read the full details, complete with screenshots, on the official Adium blog.
Radar.net wants to be your iPhone's photo sharer
We're at a new juncture in the course of iPhone development, I believe. Twitter has basically monopolized the "text exporting" function of your iPhone -- if you want to broadcast text from a mobile device, most of us do it through Twitter. But now, we're seeing a whole host of sites and services aiming to be the distributors for your richer media: photos, audio, even video (as well as the iPhone can handle it, anyway). Radar is one such service, and they'd really like to handle any photos you want to send out into the world. But unlike a site such as Twitpic, they're not content with being just the repository. They want to host, share, and deliver. Whenever you want to mess around with pictures on your iPhone, whether that be taking them and sharing them, browsing your friends' pictures from Flickr, or looking at funny shots from CollegeHumor, Radar wants to be there.They gave TUAW an early look at their new software, just released to the App Store, and we were duly impressed -- they've got hooks into a surprising number of places, and it's clear they've worked hard to make themselves fit somewhere into your photosharing flow. But is it worth it to have yet another site acting as a go-between for you and your photo content? Read on to find out.%Gallery-47505%
Beta Beat: TweetDeck ripe with potential
Since it's turned into Twitter Thursday around here... In a moment of sheer frustration with Twitterrific, I sent out a call on my Twitter feed for recommendations of a desktop Twitter client. Several folks replied with a nod to TweetDeck, an Adobe AIR-based client currently in development for OS X, Linux, and Windows.TweetDeck is a pretty neat program. The selling point is the ability to split your main Twitter feed into subfeeds that you can then organize into different groups. You can have Twitter be as narrow as a single column while you scroll back and forth in it, or you can make it full-screen and have your monitor filled with nothing but tweeting goodness.There's a lot of features as well. If you go over the 140-character limit, you can hit a "TweetShrink" button that will turn some of the words to LOL-speak in order to fit the limit. You can upload pictures -- clicking on the TwitPic button will upload the image file to TwitPic and give you the URL for your feed -- and you can shorten URLs via your choice of service by clicking the "Shorten" button. Another very cool feature is the ability to translate your tweets into another language. The translation is pretty accurate -- even for more difficult languages such as the Japanese I tested with the application. The program itself is highly customizable, and you can tweak the colors and fonts to whatever you like. You can also set different update times for various feeds: for example, you can have your main friends update every minute, but your private messages every five minutes.TweetDeck is extremely polished for a beta client and I've yet to get the error messages that plagued me with Twitterrific. If you're searching for a free desktop client for Twitter, it's hard to beat this one.TweetDeck is in public beta and requires the Adobe AIR runtime, which is a Universal binary and needs OS X 10.4.11 or higher. AIR will be installed during the TweetDeck installation process if you do not already have it.
Caption Contest: Best Buy FTW
A Twitterer documents the demise of one big box via the burn of another. Tim: "And thus the 2009 FatWallet suicide craze began."Josh F: "First!"Joe: "Yeah, but what about the Palm store?"Laura: "So, you're telling me I have to pay full price for this copy of Final Destination IV? FINE."Richard: "...And we finally have proof you never actually shopped there anyway."Paul: "We've also stopped matching Buy More prices ever since that silly 3D episode."Jacob: "...And we're therefore rebranding to Kinda the Best Buy.'"Ross: "For $100, the Geek Squad has offered to read these aloud to you. For an extra $50, they'll stop themselves from giggling through the word 'unfortunate.'"Nilay: "Also, it's okay to start liking 'Just What I Needed' again."Sean: "We will, however, attempt to make the Circuit City faithful feel right at home with some new bait and switch tactics of our own."Don: "Circuit City employees will be hired based on their technical knowledge, communication skills, and rapping ability."[Thanks, Adam]
iPhone pix making front pages
The crash and near miraculous rescue of the passengers and crew of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in New York City has been big news for the last day. Like many news events, it has been extensively covered by news agencies, and, as we are seeing more frequently now, by the public using camera phones.With the popularity of the iPhone, a breaking news story is never far from our favorite cellular device. Janis Krums, a Florida businessman, was on a Hudson River ferry boat when the pilot plunged the airliner into the frigid waters yesterday afternoon. His picture of the sinking aircraft, with passengers knee deep in water on the right wing helped tell the story in a single image, and his dramatic shot was splashed on front pages across the country. Krums used Twitpic to publish his photo, and that service was soon shut down by high traffic. He was interviewed on MSNBC and kept his friends up to date on his Twitter feed.Flickr is also displaying lots of photos from the scene, many of them taken by iPhones. Not much happens today out of the sight of a camera or a camera phone. Janis Krums scooped just about everybody using only his quick wits and his favorite mobile phone.[via PDN Pulse, news services, MSNBC]]
Iconfactory releases Twitterrific 1.1 for iPhone
The Iconfactory and its chief typist, Craig Hockenberry, have been hard at work on Twitterrific 1.1, a substantial update to their mobile Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod touch. The update features much smoother scrolling, larger tweet capacity, the ability to save pictures to the camera roll before uploading them to TwitPic, and secure HTTPS server communication. It also squashes a large number of bugs. A full accounting of the changes is available on Twitterrific's app store page and on the Iconfactory's website. The app was included in both Mike's and Steve's list of favorite apps for their respective iPhones. Twitterrific is still available in two flavors. Twitterrific (the free version) periodically shows ads via The Deck, similar to its free counterpart for the desktop. Twitterrific Premium is $9.99, and omits the advertising.
