Twitpic crashed this afternoon due to all the traffic from a now famous iPhone snapshot that Twitterer Janis Krums took of the crashed US Airways plane in the Hudson River.
Twitpic takes it place as THE breaking news image source. Why? It’s simple to use and has become a standard. In an extraordinary, emergency situation, citizen journalists have no time to figure out how to send their iPhone snapshots to CNN or any other media outlet. In fact, CNN should just buy or invest in Twitpic now.
Now that opportunistic programmers see the power of a Twitter app like Twitpic, expect development of a new set of apps that facilitate news gathering and reporting. For example, iPhone apps developed by news organizations like NYT might include a camera link that allows its users to send snapshots directly to the news organization.
One snapshot from a ferry spawns a 15-minute celebrity:
[...] about Apple Hardware as of January 15, 2009 #Flight1549 – Twitpic’s Coming of Age – mediatransparent.com 01/16/2009 Twitpic crashed this afternoon due to all the traffic from a now [...]
[...] found so far this morning that can embed videos on Twitter. Tweetree has potential to become Twitpic for video, which just proved its value with Janis Krums’ famous Twitpic picture of the downed Flight [...]
[...] Before Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, nobody knew how to send a breaking news picture to CNN. Afterwards, CNN made it more prominent on their iReports site on how to send pictures. I [...]
[...] ubiquity on mobile devices can make it a mobile Paypal platform. The uploading of the iPhone picture of Flight #1549 in the Hudson onto Twitter application Twitpic is evidence of Twitter becoming an event-based mobile [...]