• Twitpic Launches An iPhone App, But Is It Too Late?

    John Biggs

    Biggs is the East Coast Editor of TechCrunch. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at... → Learn More

    Monday, May 7th, 2012
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    Twitpic was once the de facto standard for photo sharing on Twitter. Before Instagram and Twitter’s own photo-sharing solution, the service worked a treat, allowing us to compress our photos and share them in the twinkle of an eye.

    The app resided as sort of a symbiotic pilot fish near Twitter’s gaping maw. Now, however, it’s angling for center stage.

    Sadly, it may be too late. With Facebook’s recent Instagram purchase and the rise of any number of alternative picture solutions, a standalone app just to tweet pictures sounds a little like overkill. Sure Twitpic is reaching 35 million consumers, but how long is it before those folks stop using the standard photo solutions made available in generic Twitter apps and discover the plethora of filter-adding photo editors out there already?

    Twitpic isn’t hurting for cash and they’ve never taken funding. However, once a dedicated group of users who used Twitpic blindly by default notices there are other apps out there, is this really the one they’ll choose? Not likely, but stranger things have happened.

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