One year after being acquired by Twitter, Posterous shuts it all down

Posterous is kaput.

The super-simple blogging engine that evolved from blogging by email to private photo and note sharing, but never managed to compete with the high-flying Tumblr, is being shut down. The team will now focus 100 percent on Twitter, the company said in a blog post.

Posterous had been acquired by Twitter in March of last year for undisclosed — read small  — terms, and will be shut down almost exactly a year after the deal closed. It had taken on a total of $15 million of venture capital from Redpoint Ventures and other participants in, ironically, March 2010, and had 12 million monthly unique visitors at that point.

But that number has been dropping, and while it still has a not-insignificant 1.33 million monthly visitors, Tumble is growing through 26 million currently, and WordPress.com is perennially in the 30 million range.

Above: Posterous web traffic

Image Credit: Compete.com

From Twitter’s perspective, I guess, once you do the aqui-hire is complete and you have the hires, why keep the acqui?

Interestingly, the instructions the miniblogging service is providing to Posterous users detailing how to export their posts into other blogging hosts do not mention Tumblr, though they do mention WordPress and SquareSpace. Could there be some lingering bitterness?

In any case, it’s a sad day for Posterous users who remain, and those of us who appreciated the site’s dream of simple blogging and sharing.

Here’s the full announcement:

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.

Here are the steps:

1. Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
2. Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.
3. When your backup is ready, you’ll receive an email.
4. Return to http://posterous.com/#backup to download a .zip file.

If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30.

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.

Sachin Agarwal
Founder and CEO

photo credit: dyniss via photopin cc