Twitpic founder Noah Everett prefers to shut down his six year old service rather than retract its trademark application to the USPTO as demanded by Twitter. The service will shut down on September 25 and users will be given an opportunity to export all of their hosted images prior to the date.
Twitter had opposed the trademark application which was filed in 2009 and threatened to refuse access to Twitter’s API but a company spokesperson said that Twitpic was actually allowed to continue to operate using the name, just not as a trademarked name because Twitter considers that a violation of its own.
There doesn’t seem to be a business case that can be made out of a Twitter-specific photo hosting service especially after Twitter rolled out its own, so the legal threat about the name seems like a perfect excuse Everett needs to shut down without needing to disclose the real reason if there was one.
Some years ago a competing service called tweetphoto was acquired and renamed as Lockerz. The acquiring company failed to find a viable business model in the Twitter photo hosting service and is now gone, having been acquired by a Chinese company a few years ago and no longer deals with Twitter.
When Twitpic was not asked to be one of the partners for Twitter’s own photo hosting service a few years ago Everett went and built a competing microblogging service called Heello which mimicked Twitter but it soon faded into irrelevance.
If Everett is so hung up with wanting to trademark the name more than anything, it smells fishy. It’s a bit of a shame because Twitpic’s approach was different to Twitter’s own although in terms of purpose and function they’re identical. It was an alternative that a lot of people found preferable to Twitter’s own.
AuliaSays 