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Twitpic says it won't be shutting down after all

Twitpic says it won't be shutting down after all

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The company says it has been acquired

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Two weeks after saying it would be forced to shut down because of a trademark conflict with Twitter, image-hosting service Twitpic said today that it will live on. The company has been acquired, though in a tweet it would not say by whom:

Earlier this month, Twitpic founder Noah Everett said Twitter had contacted the company demanding it abandon its trademark application or have its API access revoked. Twitter responded by saying that it had no issue with Twitpic retaining its name but had objected to other, unspecified "trademarks tied to the brand."

Twitpic launched in 2008, before Twitter started hosting images on its own servers. In 2009 it hosted the famous picture of US Airways Flight 1549, which crash landed in the Hudson River after being struck by birds; the photo was featured prominently in Twitter's S-1 filing prior to its initial public offering. Yesterday, a team of volunteer web archivists complained that Twitpic was blocking its efforts to save the images hosted on the service.