Twitter pulls the plug on blogging service Posterous
The blogging service will close as of 30 April, but a new site is springing up in its place.
Blogging service Posterous is closing. Sachin Agarwal, the company's founder and CEO, made the announcement in a blog post, suitably enough. If you're still using the service, you have until 30 April to download all your posts, videos and photos. After that Posterous, and its mobile apps, will cease to exist.
Twitter bought Posterous last year, and promised to leave it "up and running without disruption." It stayed true to its word for a while, but didn't push out any updates or give word on what was happening -- until now.
Posterous was a challenger to Tumblr, and was lauded for its simplicity. It made blogging "as simple as sending an email", according to my colleague Jennifer Van Grove at CNET in the US.
If you don't want to lose your blog posts, just follow these steps. Head to http://posterous.com/#backup and click 'Request Backup' next to your Space name. You'll get an email when your backup is ready, then just return to the page and download the .zip file. Easy as that. Just make sure you do so before 30 April.
If you want to keep your links intact, you can head over to Posthaven, which is a new site from Posterous co-founder Garry Tan. You'll have to pony up $5 (£3.22) a month, but Tan promises the site will never shut down. He told TechCrunch: "I'm teaming up with another co-founder of Posterous, Brett Gibson, and we are taking a pledge to keeping the URLs online forever. It's $5 a month and will have all of the ease of use and power of Posterous. It's just the two of us and we're coding it in our bedrooms right now."
Though the site is having issues. Tan tweeted: "Please bear with us through the 503 errors -- we're working to fix Posthaven asap. (We had no idea Posterous would announce today.)"
Will you be sad to see Posterous go? Was Twitter right to close it? What do you think of Posthaven? Let me know in the comments, or on Facebook.