Twitpic avoids graveyard as mystery buyer steps in

Twitpic made a U-turn on its way to the graveyard.

In tweet posted today, Twitpic said that “we’re happy to announce we’ve been acquired and Twitpic will live on! We will post more details as we can disclose them.”

Twitpic basically died earlier this month after it announced that it was caving to the scary possibility of a bruising trademark court battle with the decidedly bigger Twitter. Twitpic enables users to infuse Tweets with photos.

Indeed, Twitter threatened to cut off Twitpic’s API, which would have decapitated the much smaller San Francsico-based company. In an email to VentureBeat, Twitpic founder and CEO Noah Everett wrote Sept. 25 would be his company’s last day.

“It started a few weeks ago. We hoped they would drop their case against our mark, but they made it clear they would not,” Everett said in an email to me then. “Sorry to not be able to give you anymore details than that, but honestly, that’s all there really is.”

Everett explained his reasons for caving to Twitter’s threats to head to court in a blog post:

“A few weeks ago Twitter contacted our legal demanding that we abandon our trademark application or risk losing access to their API. This came as a shock to us since Twitpic has been around since early 2008, and our trademark application has been in the USPTO since 2009.”

But now Twitpic lives. And, did Twitter buy them out? Waiting to hear back from Everett. Stay tuned.