14 DAY TRIAL // Twitpic is definitely going to get shut down for good next week after going through a period when it thought it was actually going to survive.
The service that offered users the chance to share pictures in tweets back when Twitter couldn’t do so announced at the beginning of September that the service would be shutting down on September 25.
The admins gave users the news that they were going to be able to export all their content via a new feature that went live a few days later.
“A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark application or risk losing access to their API. This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009,” they said at the time.
The company had been trying to trademark its name since 2009, a year after the service was launched. The road hasn’t been smooth for the company “even though our first use in commerce predated other applications.” Even so, the company didn’t manage to get the trademark it wanted.
About a month ago, before the service was supposed to close in the first place, Twitpic announced that it had been acquired and will no longer be shutting down.
“We're happy to announce we've been acquired and Twitpic will live on! We will post more details as we can disclose them,” read a message posted on the company’s official account. They didn’t offer any more details about it at the time and have refrained to give out anything ever since.
Game over
Well, until earlier when the company admitted that it was game over. The service’s life has been expanded with one month, it seems, as the service will be shutting down on October 25.
“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, 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,” the company said.
The company’s CEO says he is sorry for the circumstances and embarrassed by the entire situation.
It seems like they may have been quick to jump the gun with the announcement, making users hope for a success story instead. Either way, the company is now offering users a way to download their content, as they promised in the beginning and they’ll have until October 25 to get everything down.