Twitter Acquires Posterous

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. sexlocals

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.