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.
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)?
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?
This stuff isn't free to maintain.
Number 2 sounds like a completely reasonable approach.
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.
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?
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.
If the data is important to you, clearly you have a working backup (or multiple), don't you?
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?
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.
>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.
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.