Update: TwitPic has announced via its Twitter account that it has been acquired and will not be shutting down. No further details are available at this time.
When US Airways Flight 1549 crash landed in the Hudson River, the first photos of the evacuation weren’t at the New York Times or CNN or even on someone’s blog. They were on TwitPic, the service that hosts images for use on Twitter.
That’s just one of the ways that people across the globe have documented our rapidly changing world using the service. From political revolutions like the Arab Spring uprisings to sporting events to birthday parties, TwitPic hosts a rich archive of images documenting our culture and, yes, history.
But that’s all coming to an end. TwitPic will soon shut down, and apparently, the site’s owners are resisting efforts to move its vast digital archive elsewhere. It’s yet another cautionary tale of the modern web. We use our web services as if they will always be there, as if we can always go back to them. But that’s not always the case. Web services die—and sometimes you can’t save what they hold.
Twitpic shutting down on September 25, according to an announcement posted on the company blog by founder Noah Everett earlier this month. And some people are worried that all those pictures will be gone forever. “It was the first major Twitter picture service, going back to 2008,” says Jason Scott, the spokesperson for the Archive Team, a loose collective of internet archivists. “There’s a full snapshot of human culture in early Twitter, and photos are a part of that.”
Web services die—and sometimes you can’t save what they hold.
He worries that if TwitPic’s service goes away, there will be no record of the thousands of photos hosted there. Of course, the US Airways shot and many of the most famous photos will live on elsewhere, but the original posts, with all their comments, could disappear, as might thousands of lesser known photos that could be of interest to historians in the future. “There will be no record of many of these photos ever existing,” Scott says.
That’s why the Archive Team is trying to download TwitPic’s archives while they still can. The trouble is TwitPic seems to be blocking their efforts, and no one knows exactly why.
Since 2009, the Archive Team has worked to preserve endangered web content for posterity. When Yahoo shut down Geocities, they swung into action, backing up nearly a terabyte’s worth of websites. In 2012, when blogging service Posterous closed its doors, they were there to save over 6 million blogs. “Usually, it goes pretty smoothly, but sometimes we encounter resistance,” Scott says. “Or the infrastructure isn’t good enough for people to download all the files they have on offer.” But it’s not entirely clear to Scott why TwitPic is blocking their efforts since there has been so little communication.
Earlier this week, someone claiming to be Everett stopped by the team’s chat room and asked them to slow down because TwitPic was working on a system that would help users export their pictures. But Scott says Archive Team has heard nothing from Everett since then, and the export feature has yet to surface. Meanwhile, TwitPic has been sending abuse complaints to Archive Team members’ service providers. TwitPic did not respond to our request to comment on this story.
‘We’ve had families come to us and thank us because we saved photos for them.’
The Archive Team’s activities are legally murky. Simply downloading the content from a publicly available space isn’t illegal, but republishing it elsewhere may be. Scott says that the team generally doesn’t face complaints in that area, however. “We’ve had families come to us and thank us because we saved photos for them,” he says. “And in some cases people don’t want this stuff public, and we take it down.”
Scott says he doesn’t think copyright issues are what TwitPic is upset about. He think it’s more likely that the site is having trouble supporting the amount of downloading the Archive Team is doing, and that the team would be happy to work with TwitPic to find a way to keep from overburdening the company’s servers.
He also speculates that TwitPic is actually trying to work out a last minute deal to save the site. Scott points out that there’s no notice on the TwitPic front page that the service is shutting down, and that new users can still sign-up and upload photos to the site. But until he hears otherwise, the team is assuming the worst and trying to save what they can.
