TwitPic was launched in 2008 by Noah Everett. 'TwitPic' is a website that allows users to easily post pictures to the Twitter microblogging and social media service. TwitPic is often used by citizen journalists to upload and distribute pictures in near real-time as an event is taking place. TwitPic can be used independently of Twitter, in a way similar to Flickr, however, several characteristics make this site a companion for Twitter. TwitPic usernames and passwords are the same as the ones in Twitter and comments to photographs are sent as a reply tweet. Anyone with a Twitter account can post pictures to the site and TwitPic URLs are already short, making it unnecessary to use URL shortening. There are also iPhone, Blackberry and Android mobile phone apps that have the capability of uploading images to TwitPic.