Twitpic Couldn’t Find an Acquirer, Will Shut Down After All on Oct 25th | Hacker News Reader

Twitpic Couldn’t Find an Acquirer, Will Shut Down After All on Oct 25th

techcrunch.com

55 pointsLukeB_UK58 comments

From Jason Scott's twitter, I take it the ArchiveTeam efforts to back up all the data will resume.

On this note, you can help: you can download the ArchiveTeam Warrior virtual machine, which is both easy to run and helpful to the ArchiveTeam. Your computer will help grab more of the missing data before it disappears forever.

ArchiveTeam projects tend to pop up and disappear quickly, much like the websites they are archiving, so you can even just leave a warrior running and when something happens, it will be at the ready. (My Warrior is currently working on the GameMaker sandbox project, for example.)

You can also run the Warrior scripts directly, without a VM, in some setups.

I glossed over some of the details; there is a lot more info at the link below. I encourage you to try running a Warrior yourself.

http://archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Warrior

Previously:

Twitpic is shutting down (2014-09-04): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8269553

"We've been acquired and Twitpic will live on" (2014-09-18): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8337867

Stating "we've been acquired" in their past tweet, and now stating "We were almost certain we had found a new home for Twitpic (hence our previous tweet), but agreeable terms could not be met" are two very different things. I don't like the dishonesty from their past tweet.

Tell them to go take a hike... oh wait...

Acquisitions are complex and take a long time to really close. Most of the time you see articles about a company being sold, the deal isn't actually done yet. WhatsApp agreed to terms in February, but the deal didn't actually close until a week ago. Was it a lie to say that WhatsApp had sold to Facebook before October?

That said, I have no idea what the case is here.

Twitpic's unfortunate fate is a reminder that your company hasn't been acquired until the money is in the bank. As pg put it, "Deals fall through" [1]:

Startup founders tend to be optimistic. This can work well in technology, at least some of the time, but it's the wrong way to approach raising money. Better to assume investors will always let you down. Acquirers too, while we're at it. At YC one of our secondary mantras is "Deals fall through." No matter what deal you have going on, assume it will fall through. The predictive power of this simple rule is amazing.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/fundraising.html

This one is a little harder to swallow since the alternative is shutting down the service with no cash in hand. Surely there was a deal on the table to keep the service running?

The terms still have to be compelling to be acquired. Acquisition isn't a panacea by any means. The details can make shutting down a company more attractive then going through with the acquisition.

A simple example is an acquisition that doesn't sound terribly exciting, pays out money in earn outs and puts those earn outs 4 years into the future.

Sometimes it's better to just get on with your life...

If the monthly burn wasn't too bad, I'd consider taking it on.

This is a curious statement "but agreeable terms could not be met." Since the alternate choice was "death" one wonders who preferred that over some form of acquisition. I suppose it is always possible that the acquirer was steadfast in demanding certain team members be part of the deal and could not come to an arrangement with them, but that is the only thing that I can come up with that might prevent at least something from going through.

I think there's lots of things that can go wrong in an acquisition which fall under "agreeable terms could not be met". It's hard to tell if a letter of intent was drafted or signed which would clearly lay out the terms. If not then I'd say the acquisition announcement was made prematurely.

If the terms hadn't been laid out then there's a whole slew of things that could cause it to go south on either side.

Twitpic probably could have won a trademark lawsuit against Twitter. They'd registered "TWITPIC" as a trademark, and the USPTO had approved it, then published it for opposition. Twitter opposed it, disagreeing with the USPTO. So there was a case pending before the Trademark Trials and Appeals Board.

At the time "TWITPIC" was first used, Twitter did not have an image product. The USPTO saw no conflict with "TWITTER" as a trademark. The examiner did see a conflict with "TWITVID", so Twitpic and Twitvid cut a deal and reported that to the USPTO, allowing the trademark registration to proceed. It's quite possible that Twitpic would have prevailed in court. It won't go to court, though; Twitpic abandoned their application on October 8, 2014.

"TWITVID", meanwhile, has their trademark registered, and continues to operate.

I'll acquire them for $10. Oh wait, they do probably say no, because their exit strategy was to get acquired by twitter or someone else for millions upon millions. Any money is better than no more, and the market is willing to pay what it's currently worth, they should sell it to the highest bidder and be done with it.

I wonder how much the twitpic domain is worth? That's a lot of dangling link juice.

It would be great for them to get a copy of everything to the Internet Archive.

Proof that forcing your users to give the rights to their content to your business does not necessarily mean your business is a good one.

Imgur and others handle to make a profit with ads. Why can't Twitcpic?

The more this happens the more I agree with Jason Scott that it should be illegal to allow data to be arbitrarily destroyed like this.

Users can now export their photos until the 25th, at which point they’ll vanish into the void.

Since you want this to be illegal, what do you propose instead? Some country's taxpayers pay to keep the servers up maybe?

And really why should it be illegal, doesn't the government stick it's nose into far too much already? Do you mean illegal illegal, or breach-of-contract "illegal" (in which case, what contract)?

Consider sending a dump to Internet Archive.

This assumes all data is public

Well, all the TwitPic data is public.

Sure but most services that shutdown have some sort of personal data or the other. You cannot dump them on the internet archive.

It would be interesting to see a form of "data insurance". Company pays insurance premiums by stored TB, and if they go bust, the insurance company ensures the data is kept hosted (be it themselves or by preparing the data and donating resources to the Internet Archive)

An Internet Fidelity Bond, if you will.

The TwitPic export page is giving 503 errors, so you can't export your stuff.

Why should it be "illegal"? There's nothing wrong with things being forgotten.

First, it's my data and the service should keep it instead of deleting it. If I put some stuff in a storage locker, the locker's owner can't just toss it in the garbage, even with 10 day's notice. Second, there's a loss to our culture when a huge trove of media gets trashed like that. It's like a museum deciding it's too expensive to maintain some artwork and just pitching it.

"it should be illegal" is very different from "it should not happen."

if anything, i'd bet that law would just make a bunch more data disappear, as hosting any data for anyone else would now become extremely risky; you open yourself up to permanent liability by taking anything anyone uploads. who wants that?

I don't think anyone said "permanent". But 10 days is not enough time. How about 6 months from the first notification sent to the user? And it should be extended if the export service itself goes down (like TwitPic's is broken right now).

I'm ok with companies not taking data that can't handle it.

Isn't Twitpic a free service? You would pay for a storage locker right? Museums charge money.

This stuff isn't free to maintain.

A free storage locker couldn't chuck my stuff in the trash either. TwitPic didn't ask anyone to pay to keep their data. They just decided to delete it. And museums don't charge the artist for upkeep.

If I had a friend tell me that his free storage locker chucked his stuff, I'd tell him thats what he gets for using a free storage locker.

And you would be wrong, because no one deserves to have their stuff chucked and it's actually illegal. Your friend has recourse in that situation.

So say TwitPic literally had no money to keep the servers running that housed your data, what then? Tell them to suck it and all get new jobs to support your data? Or give you a grace period to reclaim that data?

Number 2 sounds like a completely reasonable approach.

So they ran out of money suddenly? With no warning, they discover they have only 10 days to survive? They should still work with archivists to offload the data.

They could at least turn off new registrations, and put some kind of notice on the home page that they're about to shut down. TwitPic is still accepting new signups and uploads.

I don't know but what if they did? You offer no alternative other than saying it should be illegal, what if a service actually did run out of money immediately? Throw them in jail because their servers got repossessed by the bank?

If a storage company went under and gave everyone notice to pick up their old shit and after the deadline there were still unclaimed items, what are they supposed to do?

I would sue a storage company and the owners personally that destroyed my possessions without giving me enough time to go get them. 10 days is not enough time. 100 days might not be enough time. The amount of time should be decided by someone, like the state in which the company resides

This exact outcome (running out of money and shutting down) was foreseeable from day 1. They should have had a plan in place beyond pretending it wasn't going to happen until it was too late.

The company has no money, what are you going to sue them for? If they're properly incorporated you wouldn't be able to go after the owners.

You can break the corporate veil when execs break the law.

Except that's never the case, the silicon valley wage fixing scandal was hugely illegal and they got fined/class action lawsuit. No criminal charges.

Donate the data to a 3rd party company. It's not that hard.

It costs money to keep the servers running. If the data is that important, perhaps you should pay for the service?

Sure, where do I send the check?

If I put some stuff in a storage locker, the locker's owner can't just toss it in the garbage

If something is in a storage locker, it cannot possibly also be in your attic at the same time. That doesn't apply to bits.

Although that doesn't apply here. Twitpic was never promoted as -- and never operated as -- a "storage locker".

> First, it's my data and the service should keep it instead of deleting it.

If the data is important to you, clearly you have a working backup (or multiple), don't you?

Sure. But I don't let Seagate off the hook if my hard drive dies just because I have my data backed up. I get a warranty with that.

One difference is that Seagate provides a data store and Twitpic doesn't provide a data store, it provides a service.

It's not even certain that Twitpic kept your original photo or artwork. If you uploaded a 4000 x 3000-pixel image, it reduced it to 600 pixels wide for posting inline on Twitter.

Did you actually use it?

And the warranty replaces the lost data?

When businesses shut down it's legally acceptable for customer data to be destroyed. Your pictures are just data, and if those images are so important then you should have backed them up in another place. Furthermore I'm positive the EULA you signed when registering covers all of these events.

Expensive artwork doesn't get thrown away, but you'd be amazed how often it gets donated away when a business can no longer operate and can't find a buyer. And this is art that has actual monetary value, not the random sorts of things that find their way to Twitter/Twitpic.

Don't be so positive. Laws for consumer protection, copyright, and data privacy override EULAs.

I can guarantee you there are works of art on twitpic that cannot be found anywhere else.

If it's your data, you should keep it instead of handing it off a to a service. Especially a free one with no obligation to hold onto your data. The cool thing about data is you don't need to store it in just one single place.

>If I put some stuff in a storage locker, the locker's owner can't just toss it in the garbage, even with 10 day's notice.

If you never paid for the locker and it wasn't yours in the first place, of course they can.

Correct. In addition, Twitpic wasn't a storage locker, and it never pretended to be. As its name implies, it existed for the sole purpose of posting pics to Twitter.

Further to that, I suspect most of the stuff uploaded to Twitpic wasn't actually owned by the people who uploaded it. That was certainly true in my case.

Hm, downvotes for making true and accurate statements ;-)

... said the horde who burned the Alexandria library.

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