Twitter just announced that it has acquired Posterous, the popular minimalist blogging service. Posterous' services will remain up and running for the time being and the company's blog promises to "give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service." The Posterous team will join Twitter and will, according to today's announcement, work on "on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better."
Neither Twitter nor Posterous disclosed any financial details of this transaction. Since its launch, Posterous raised about $10 million. The company received its seed funding from Y Combinator in 2008.
Why Would Twitter Buy a Blogging Platform?
This is a relatively unusual acquisition for Twitter. Until now, the company has mainly acquired companies that were already producing products closely related to Twitter itself (including TweetDeck, for example). Posterous, on the other hand, is quite a departure from this. The service, which first made a name for itself by providing very minimalist blogging tools, isn't a clear fit for Twitter, so chances are the goal of this acquisition was more to hire the Posterous team than to integrate the blogging platform into Twitter.
Even though Posterous was one of the first players in this field of minimalist/short form blogging tools, Tumblr quickly became the more popular platform. While Posterous tried to reinvent itself over the last few months, the service was never quite able to match its competitor's traction, though judging from most of the publicly available traffic data, the service was still growing slowly but steadily.
What Will Happen to Posterous?
Twitter says that the Posterous service will "remain up and running without disruption." At the same time, though, the company also notes that it will give users "ample notice" if it makes any changes to the service and that it will provide users with instructions for backing up their data and moving to another service. Chances are then, that Twitter isn't planning on keeping Posterous up and developing its features for too long.
@mammalpants Two companies with no biz plan or revenue? What could possibly go wrong? 😉
@heathr nothing against posterous. Just wondering how it fits with twitter. Cc: @fredericl
@obrien it could become Twitter’s platform for photos & videos. I doubt they’ll do that, too. I give them 6 months before they shut it
@fredericl Yeah, more likely Twitter whacks Posterous. But still: why but it in the first place? Just for the hires?
@obrien quite likely. After all, in the crazy world of Silicon Valley, buying a company just for the team is considered a rational decision
@fredericl Plus, likely bails out a few VCs, though haven’t checked overlap with Twitter investors.
Backup your Posterous Spaces NOW – if you have a Mac!
http://pfapps.com/apps/PosterousBackup.html
First of all, that is why if you blog in a regular basis, you should have a self hosted domain.
Second, will they really shut down Posterous?, I guess it still has plenty of traffic to compete against tumblr and livejournal.
Besides, after they shut down, Im pretty sure they are leaving space for another company to create a very similar service and fill in the gap.
For sure Twitter has a great plan for Posterous. It is one good blogging platform and it can help Twitter in finding more success. Let us wait for further updates to know of their plan of acquiring the https://members.optimalhosting.com/domainchecker.php.