People who started using Twitter, say in 2008, may recall that it was impossible to share photos on this microblogging site. While most of us would wonder when such a service would be made available on the platform, someone named Noah Everett decided to do something about it. In 2008 he founded TwitPic, a photo hosting site that uses Twitter as its backbone.
Since last September, the photo-sharing site has been part of a mini series of social-media-platforms-drama. In early September, the company announced that it is going dark, shutting down its services over some legal disputes with Twitter; few weeks later, the company said no, we have a plan to stay, we are coming back; a month later, the founder said that he was embarrassed to re-announce that the shutting down plan was still alive. Finally, and few hours before the shutdown deadline, came Twitter to close the chapter, it acquired the company.
TwitPic was a small company in every sense. In a 2010 interview, the founder said that there were only four persons, including his parents, working on the platform.
In 2009, the site made around $1.5 million in ad sales. The site was having around 6.5 registered users, and by early 2010, the founder was offered “an eight figure” number to sell the platform.
Putting the blame on Twitter on every step of the way, TwitPic announced that it was forced to shut down after Twitter’s legal team contacted the company and demanded that it should abandon its trademark, otherwise, Twitter would revoke TwitPic’s API, the key to its operations.
TwitPic was clear that it couldn’t engage with Twitter in a court fight, signaling the start of the dramatic story that ended with Twitter itself acquiring the platform. In a blog post a few days ago, the founder wrote “we have reached an agreement with Twitter to give them the Twitpic domain and photo archive, thus keeping the photos and links alive for the time being.”
The service would be on a “read-only” mode, no more photos could be uploaded to the platform, while saving millions of photos from which some were considered both historic and symbolic. One of those is the famous photo taken by a businessman, crossing the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey on a ferry, of the US Airways Flight that had to be ditched in the river. Those photos brought the whole TwitPic platform crashing down as it went viral that day.
There are a number of reports, which hint that this whole dramatic saga has been a well-played game by the founder and his team to force some investors to buy the company that, although a pioneer, has lost its relevance after Twitter itself started hosting photos on its own servers.
So, here is the lesson: In the world of Web and social media, creative ideas could take you a long way in the world of business.
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