Sharing photographs and other images on Twitter is a fairly natural and thus wildly popular extension of the micro-sharing service’s main reason for being. We’ve earlier noticed how TwitPic seems to have emerged as the leader of the pack. Its growth rate is practically up to par with the increase in visitors and users Twitter itself is seeing the past couple of months. Traffic to TwitPic.com has spiked to about 2.3 million unique visitors per month according to Compete stats (which, based on experience, means it probably receives a good deal more) and last night the TwitPic account boasted about having signed up its 1 millionth user.
The downside of TwitPic is that it’s becoming quite a burden for just one guy (Noah Everett) to operate. Remarkably, he has done a good job of keeping the service up most of the time, but today the service is experiencing some major hiccups. While the website is still reachable, it’s no longer possible to log in with your account and all direct links to uploaded photographs have gone dead, with a message saying that the picture in question does not exist anymore (ironically, it suggest other photos under that message, but also with dead links).
Update: fixed now (around 7:30 AM)
Naturally, users are up in arms about the downtime and the possibility that their pics may be lost. Mostly, they are confused about the message, and I guess it would actually be better for TwitPic if it were simply down completely, like it was last January (for nearly 24 hours).
The Twitter account and blog of TwitPic remain silent over the issue so far (update: now citing ‘database issues’) and (once again ironically) the latest blog post – dated April 6 – mentions a move to a new data center, which supposedly upped the performance:
First off, the data center move was completed last week and things are running much smoother now. The move is now allowing us to scale easier as Twitpic grows and boy are we growing at an astounding rate. Thank you so much for your patience with us these last few months as we’ve learned to handle Twitpic’s growth.
If TwitPic can’t keep up with the current growth, someone will sooner or later step up to the plate and challenge its dominance on the Twitter photo sharing playing field. Unless Everett comes up with a way to stabilize the experience, users might run to alternatives like Pixim and TweetPhoto, two web services we covered earlier.
In fact, I think sooner or later someone should provide the small company with some seed funding, or acquire it outright.
TwitPic is a great service! Keep up the good work!
P.S.: Our Website launches officially tomorrow!
These days it Seems like going down is in fashion now to attract news.
http://kansalvi...y.blogspot.com/
Just one guy? That’s impressive.
Too bad its having some issues since hitting 1 million users. I’m sure they’ll work out the kinks soon enough.
Almost no architecture survives and order of magnitude increase in size. Noah has blogged and tweeted about the incremental changes he has made to improve the system.
I don’t think he’s doing a great job “for a single guy”. He’s doing a great job in any context.
Was going to write the same thing myself and I don’t even use the service. Kudos to you, Noah! Fantastic work… With all the dumb money being thrown at hopeless startups that don’t have a thousandth the user-base that you do it’s not surprising TechCrunch is cranky you succeeded.
Certainly impressive work for one guy. It’s not easy to design and develop a system that can support that many users. Unfortunately, the speed at which technology develops often doesn’t give enough time for developers to fix bugs before someone else takes your idea and creates a better system. “If TwitPic can’t keep up with the current growth, someone will sooner or later step up to the plate and challenge its dominance on the Twitter photo sharing playing field.” – that’s so true!
decent site, but kinda useless now that you cant share thumbnails easily like you used to.
I wonder if people will start developing open-source apps for the public to roll their own Twitter image hosting service, like URL shortening services.
You might want to fix this sentence
“, which s24 hours)upposedly upped the performance.”
Btw twitpic works better than twitter comparing the staff and investment.
So this is the reason why the pics are not showing up.
I should be super happy if i’m Noah Everett, for getting the 1M users.
On the other hand, better keep going, getting funds to grow maybe?
So is twitter worth $10 billion or $30 billion??
Twitpic just makes it easier but flickr, tinypic, photobucket, and a host of other photo sites existed way before twitter and so we really don’t need another twitpic.
Twitter might want to do the same thing with Twitpic that they did with Summize.
I love http://tweetube.com. With one link you can share 5 pictures. And is running in the Amazon EC2 and S3 … should scale well … we will see …
What the hell does “really not a professional organization” mean. Somehow because the site is run by one guy he isn’t professional.
A company is professional the second it offers a product not the second it gets funding from some douchie finance guy. With that kind of mentality I do not think you should be writing about entrepreneurs. Go write about Wall Street or the government or some other lame group.
Wasn’t supposed to have a condescending tone, quite the opposite.
I found that part of the article stupid as well. One person or not, he has registered the company Twitpic Inc. in his state.
Clearly didn’t get it across the way I wanted it to. Edited now, thanks for letting me know.
It’s back up.
Seems like going down is in fashion now to attract news.
http://kansalvi...y.blogspot.com/
I think the logical progression is for Twitter to buy out TwitPic or just establish their own spin-off… I mean, it seems like a no-brainer to me…
It really needs additional funding or some budding entrepreneur might just pick up the idea and establish a competition which might outright kill it.
Twitpic? http://www.mobypicture.com is far superior!
Use it to post video, audio and photos to many differrent social sites. Really love it!
There are other services like Mobypicture that offer more features, but not one of them is nearly as successful as TwitPic for now. That and Twitter’s growth on its own makes you wonder if ‘more features’ really matters all that much to begin with.
man, you have only 140 characters for a tweet and i should give 11 of those to the word mobypicture when pasting a url? no way dude
what prevents Twitter from creating a service like this and eliminating the need for TwitPic? If Twitter had something like this already built into their site people will gravitate to it in a heartbeat. No need to goto another site to view your pics.
Nothing prevents them, but you could say the same for all the other third-party services out there. I don’t think it would be wise for Twitter to make such moves and disrupt the current ecosystem of developers that flock around it.
Wonder why Noah doesn’t utilize the EXIF data in each pic and apply AdSense or other to them.
You’d have to be on Google’s good side for that.
Hey guys, first off great job to Noah for being able to sustain that many users. The Micro-blogging / Social Network photo sharing space is getting pretty competitive, and there are some key players starting to emerge, some of which had coverage here on TechCrunch.
There is one, that in my opinion deserves some more credit, http://pikchur.com . This service will pump your photo out to a slew of networks including Twitter, Facebook, Brightkite, Tumblr and more. All while geo-tagging images from GPS enabled devices. They also have an api which I’m integrating into my twitter client (http://twitbin.com #shamelessplug)
Yep. http://pikchur.com is what I use as well. The multi-service image posting is why I use it.
Just use yfrog.com. It’s easy and always works.
Hey Robin,
If you haven’t heard of TwitGoo you definitely need to check it out. They are going to make some waves. http://www.twitgoo.com
Hit me up if you have questions!
Conor
It’s the price you pay for free device. You can’t comlain if you’re not paying for it. It’s also a burden being the first sometimes. I am sure the other pic sharing site monitor what twitpic does wrong. Downtime is common. I have an account, but I don’t always use it. So the numbers are not always telling the full story.
wow, that’s a lot of storage to have to maintain and given the timeliness of twitter (ie things are usually irrelevant after a few hours); it’s more like a disposable service. Photo storage co’s now have such a problem with space usage vs. eyeballs (i.e. ppl upload tons of pics that maybe 1-2 ppl actually ever look at, then they just sit there taking up space).
Noah -impressive work on your own!
TwitPic actually has already recieved two buyout offers, both turned down by Noah.
“Although he’s gotten two offers to be bought out — he said the last one was in the $3 million to $5 million range —he wants to grow the site himself for a while before selling it.”
http://charlest...e-to-charleston
One man can evidently make a hugee difference
Dude, with those numbers and the popularity of Twitter its time to sell off and take a vacation!
Daniel Larsson – Spideroak Online Backup
https://Spideroak.com
What will the impact be to TwitPic.com page views now that Tweetdeck offer’s thumbnails?
You’ve been pushing this point for a while now. I think it’s relevant. What does everyone else think?
http://www.twitgoo.com it’s on the Photobucket and Tinypic infrastructure..
It won’t go down..
Why not send a ton of traffic from TechCrunch and see if that helps?
I hate to toot our own horn, but Posterous is emerging as the #1 rival to twitpic, and we’re also a superset of their functionality — posting not just one photo but whole galleries, video, music, and files of any kind.
Our compete scores bear this out:
http://siteanal...tweetphoto.com/
We’re psyched to make Twitter more useful for people, and it’s something you can expect to hear more about from us very soon.
-Garry
cofounder, posterous.com
I want to thank you Robin for continuing to mention us. The @TweetPhoto team and I are very grateful. I know you have your reservations about @TweetPhoto being the underdog. I know we have lots of work cut out for us and will continue working hard to make sure we develop something of value and of use. I hope to impress and win over you and the TechCrunch community on launch day. Thanks a million! =) ~Sean
Personally, I would rather my photos be on a site that can stand on it’s own, rather than on an unstable service that only exists because it is riding the wave of another unstable service.
Twit Pic is such a good service. And goes well with the micro blogging platform of Twitter. It always good to share your tweets and same time pics, too.
Yes, this is pretty bad. TwitPic seems to have lost all my photos. Don’t know if I can continue to use the service if it keeps failing like this. Maybe they can restore my photos but right now all links from previous photos seem to go the lovely “the photo you were looking for doesn’t exist anymore” page.
I went to upload a new picture a few days ago and saw that all but one picture was there. I had about 12 pics posted.
So did I lose them??
It seems to be down again. Haven’t been able to get the website to work in two days.
We all know they can each individually share something on Twitter.
BUT they can’t share everything on Twitter like tweetjunction.com
A social community of twitter tweeters. You can upload photos, videos and music. Customize your profile. Write a blog, create a discussion in the community forum, add an event, comment, chat with and friend other members and VERY SOON tweet directly to twitter from this awesome website.
Want to know the really good part? It’s 100% free and all content created on this site can be tweeted using their unique Tweet It! button. WOW not just video, not just pics, but tweet it all!!
I am amazed with this site and SHOCKED it has not been mentioned by a few larger websites who are in love with Twitter!
I was reading the other day, their 600 members had sent a total of over 60,000 invites for their friends, family,co-workers and business contacts to join this site, all in less then 2 weeks.
If your not a already a members of this site…..DANG what are you waiting for????