Posterous is shutting down on April 30, 2013. The service was acquired by Twitter just a year ago and had made it clear at the time of the sale that it was unlikely for the service to remain up and running forever.
After its acquisition last year, the site faced outages, which quite possibly may have been the reason behind shutting down Posterous. The team’s focus may have been on other Twitter projects! At the time of purchase, Posterous had approximately 15 million unique users. But that number would soon come down to zero now.
The website was first to feature ‘cross post for social networks’. The feature allowed social network users to make one post on their Posterous Space and get it featured automatically on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. Now, after the shut down, entire team committed to working for Posterous would be shifted to projects related to the continued development of Twitter.
All mobile applications and Posterous.com will become completely unavailable to users at the end of April month. All Posterous Spaces that were visible till now would disappear from the Web.
As a last message to all Posterous Loyal users, CEO, Sachin Agarwal said,
“We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter. Thank you.”
Backup Posterous data
If you have a Posterous blog, you can save your content by going here, logging into the service and clicking “Request Backup” next to the name of your space.
When the backup is ready for download, users will receive an email with detailed instructions to save their blog’s content.
So, then, Tumblr won. That’s the bottom line. Tumblr and Posterous have always been the two big players in that market; and there are tons of “which is better” and “Tumblr vs Posterous” articles out there. What all this means, ultimately, is that Tumblr won. Simple as that.
And that’s probably as it should be. I liked a few features of Posterous better than Tumblr; however, in the end, Tumblr pretty much out-classed Posterous across the board. So the right company ultimately won, I guess.
It’s been interesting to watch the tough economic times since 2008 take-down the also-ran companies out there. It’s an interesting “survival of the fittest” economic lesson happening before our very eyes.
One of the pieces of advice that I’ve always given people in the brick-and-mortar world whenever they’re considering doing business with a small company has always been to go to the library and find a five- or ten-year-old (or even older) copy of the yellow pages, and then see if the company in question is in it. That, at least, shows whether the company’s been around for a while, and saves one from dealing with a start-up that’ll just end-up going out of business in a year or two.
On the Internet, setting bookmarks to interesting websites, and then seeing if they still work two to five years later accomplishes a similar task. Of course, Posterous has been around long enough that none of that wisdom really applies. But you get my point. Longevity matters; and tough economic times culls the weaker companies (and their websites) from the herd, leaving only the strong and lasting ones. That’s what we’ve been witnessing, especially since 2008. This Posterous thing, really, is just a part of that.
Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com