Twitpic

Noah Everett is looking to take out the bird with one clone. The Twitpic founder appears to be serving up a bit of revenge with his latest venture, Heello, a feature-for-feature Twitter clone, right down to the "@" symbol and the pastel tones.

The start-up may or may not be motivated by vengeance, but it's tough to ignore the fact that Heello was launched a day after Twitter announced its own photo-sharing service, which competes directly with third-party photo services built on Twitter's API like Twitpic.

Still, Everett claims the launch date has more to do with a certain anniversary than a jab at the blue bird.

"We launched Heello the company one year ago today and today we're launching Heello the service," he pinged to his Heello listeners earlier today. Pings are the Heello equivalent of tweets and a listener is the same as a Twitter follower.

CNET has contacted Everett for comment and will update this post when we hear back.

Everett tells VentureBeat that the project started last year as a way to make Twitter "suck less" and revolve more around e-mail, but later opted to stay closer to Twitter's social formula.

If Heello's initial offering is any indication, they didn't change much in the formula, but Everett says video and texting integration are on the way, as well as a feature called "channels" that allows listeners to be grouped together in a manner that sounds awfully similar to Google+ circles.

Perhaps Everett really has no score to settle with Twitter. He's likely more focused on celebrating today anyhow--aside from the launch, it's also his 27th birthday, or so he just notified all his fans... on Twitter. … Read more

Without Molly or Brian, CNET's podcast of indeterminate length is commandeered by indeterminate hosts. CNET's Donald Bell and Eric Franklin steer the Buzz Out Loud ship into the shark-infested waters of poached PayPal employees and Twitter CEOs. Plus, HTC is paying Microsoft for Android phones, the International Space Station reaches completion (sorta), and Mark Zuckerberg hunts for his own lunch.

It's bad enough when your plane is struck by lightning. But I'm not sure how I would react if a hole suddenly appeared in the ceiling of the 737 I was on.

I'm not sure my first instinct would be to take a picture. On the other hand, I'm not Shawna Malvini Redden.

Yesterday, Malvini Redden was on a Southwest flight from Phoenix to Sacramento when there was something of an explosion. Then, lo and behold, there appeared a three-foot hole on high. Yes, the plane had developed a skylight, sans glass.

Malvini Redden describes the … Read more

A Japanese astronaut aboard the International Space Station since December has been shooting some incredible images and sending them back to Earth.

Soichi Noguchi, a member of the Soyuz TMA-17 crew and Expedition 22, has sent more than 28 images of the world's major cities and tallest mountains taken from on board the International Space Station more than 200 miles into space. The images have been posted via Twitpic to his Twitter page.

The images below show San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge and a brilliant shot of the Amazon River as it runs through Brazil. See the full gallery … Read more

Twitter announced on its blog late Monday that users who want to submit pictures to the social network from their mobile phones can now do so through MMS. There's just one catch: it's only available to Orange UK subscribers.

According to Twitter, Orange UK users can send picture messages to Twitter's "86444" number. They need only to snap a picture, choose "Send via MMS", and input the number. Once the message is sent, the user will receive a text message asking for their Twitter credentials. Luckily, that message is only sent once. All … Read more

Here's a fun way to see new photos users are uploading to Twitter. Called Pingwire, this new tool grabs the latest photos from TwitPic and displays them in a never-ending stream of thumbnails.

If you find anything you like, you just click on it and it will take you to the source page on TwitPic where all the comments, view count, and original Tweet are stored.

TwitPic has its own recent uploads section made up of thumbnails, along with a moving map of recent photos, however I found Pingwire's simplistic stream more fun to let run in the … Read more

It seemed like celebrity deaths were contagious last week. After the sad news about Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, and Ed McMahon dying, a wave of viral death notices went out on Twitter for Britney Spears, Ellen DeGeneres, Jeff Goldblum, and P. Diddy. But all are safe and sound.

"Britney has passed today," the bogus tweet announced on Sunday. "It is a sad day for everyone. More news to come."

The message was immediately taken down and Spears' staff tweeted that her account was hacked into and that, "She is fine and dandy spending a quiet … Read more

If you're a Flickr user who delights in the simplicity of using TwitPic to take pictures in various mobile Twitter applications, you'll dig TwitPickr. This simple tool lets you republish any shots you've sent to TwitPic over to your Flickr account.

To begin, you simply drop in your Twitter username and it pulls up all the shots you've posted to TwitPic. Then you just check off the ones you want to publish to your Flickr photostream and it copies them over in one click.

As a future feature I'd love to automatically have photos from … Read more

The rapid-fire spread of a close-up photo of the US Airways plane that crashed in the Hudson River Thursday resulted in the service that hosted the picture going down.

TwitPic, an application that allows users to take pictures from their mobile phones and append them to Twitter posts, went down after at least 7,000 people attempted to view the photo of the airplane taken from a commuter ferry by Sarasota, Fla., resident Janis Krums.

According to Noah Everett, the founder of TwitPic, who still runs the service by himself, after the photo of the plane was re-tweeted by a … Read more