In September, Twitpic announced it was shutting down. Also in September, Twitpic announced it was no longer shutting down, because it had found a buyer. But Twitpic has announced again that it is shutting down, this time on October 25.
It’s a haphazard end for one of Twitter’s oldest third-party services. Twipic founder Noah Everett updated his “RIP Twitpic” blog post explaining the whole dead-not dead!-wait actually dead thing:
We worked through a handful of potential acquirers and exhausted all potential options. We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met. Normally we wouldn’t announce something like that prematurely but we were hoping to let our users know as soon as possible that Twitpic was living on.
This is an embarrassing about-face, and since we don’t know who the potential buyers were, it’s not clear if this was a badly-planned game of brinkmanship with Twitter, or if negotiations with another company simply fell apart. Twitter didn’t respond when I asked them if they had considered buying Twitpic.
Whoever was going to buy Twitpic, it’s not happening, and the service is on the way out. If you have photos you want to save, you’re supposed to be able to export your last 5000 Twitpic photos now. It looks like the exporting page is down, though, so I’ve asked Twitpic for updated information on how to reclaim your digital memories. [TechCrunch]