After being threatened by Twitter over trademarks, Twitpic has decided to shut down in 3 weeks:
"We encountered several hurdles and difficulties in getting our trademark approved even though our first use in commerce predated other applications, but we worked through each challenge and in fact had just recently finished the last one. During the 'published for opposition' phase of the trademark is when Twitter reached out to our counsel and implied we could be denied access to their API if we did not give up our mark."
Twitpic is not a small hobby site. It grew to a $3 million business at its height in 2012 according to this Mixergy interview. Founder Noah Everett also attempted to launch a Twitter-like service called Heello, though it never gained much traction and appears to be offline.
"Why not just change the name to something original?"
While I wonder if that comment may have a dual purpose, aimed as much at Standard Markdown as Twitpic, I’ll answer it anyway. Because Twitter has a well-documented history of stepping on developers. This trademark fight is just the latest, and at some point, I have to assume that Noah was fed up and called it: enough is enough.
Enough with building apps in a toxic ecosystem. Developers who care about microblogging should take it back. Let’s build tools for the web that will matter, that will move the web forward and make our writing last, not locked away behind APIs and ads.
