Sad face – Blogging service Posterous to close down
There was a time when Posterous was the hot new thing in blogging. In 2008 thousands of hardened bloggers, and some intrigued newbies, set up an account using the service because, well, it was so easy to use.
You could create a blog post simply by email, or use the Posterous bookmarklet to grab images and links from a page and create a post. It was also great with images and set up simple galleries for you very quickly.
Sadly though other blogging services quickly caught up and Posterous had the limelight stolen by its big rival Tumblr.
It was then bought by Twitter who tried to turn it into a photo sharing service. At the time of the deal many industry watchers predicted that it would not work and that Twitter had bought Posterous to get their hands on a talented developer time.
And so it has proved to be the case for the the founder Sachin Agarwal has confirmed that the service will close in April.
He has included here details on how to save your images and words, but to be honest the easiest way to back up is just to set up a WordPress account and use that service’s import facility to grab the posts.
All I can say is that it feels like a inglorious end for a start up that once promised so much….
Here’s the blog post
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:
Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.
Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.
When your backup is ready, you’ll receive an email.
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.
