14 DAY TRIAL // Twitpic is trying to stay afloat now that its bread-and-butter business is being threatened by other services and even Twitter features and has unveiled an iPhone app to go along with the online service. The app is designed to make it easy to share a photo to Twitter, but also comes with a photo editor, courtesy of Aviary.
Now, photo sharing apps haven't been exciting since the bygone days of 2010, so launching one is dubious at best.
There are plenty who would argue that it's game over for photo sharing apps with the winner (that would be Instagram) taking home the grand prize, $1 billion, €764 million from Facebook.
Incidentally, Instagram is one of the biggest sources of photos on Twitter, surpassing all competitors in the past couple of years. This considering that not all photos on Instagram are shared to Twitter.
Twitpic, as the name suggests, owes a lot of its success to Twitter. In the golden days, Twitter left plenty to be desired and a lot of services filled those gaps. One of the gaps was a simple way of sharing photos, something that Twitpic covered.
But Twitter introduced built-in photo sharing last year and the feature has proven rather popular. Twitpic still boasts 35 million users and says the numbers are still growing, but the future of a service so dependent on Twitter is uncertain.
The iPhone app, an Android version is coming within a month, is a move towards distancing itself from Twitter, to be sure, but becoming yet another photo sharing app isn't going to do anything for the service, the market is saturated and many of the existing services will eventually fail.
Some will succeed though, probably none like Instagram, but they'll find a way to survive. The fact that Twitpic has been profitable for some time and has never taken any outside investment works in its favor.