Posterous: You Coulda Been a Contender. Instead of a Bum.

  By Tac Anderson | March 13, 2012 - 5:15 am |

Yesterday Twitter announced that it was acqu-hiring Posterous. I’ve been using Twitter for five years and I’ve been using Posterous for four years and posted almost 700 posts. I was one of the early adopters and evangelists for Posterous. In fact every member of my family has a Posterous site, at work we use Posterous as an internal collaboration site and because of me Microsoft was the first corporation to use Posterous (ironic since the founders of Posterous are all ex-Apple). I’m a huge fan of how easy Posterous makes it to share posts across the web and how elegantly it handles photos.

You would think I would be happy that two of my favorite services were getting together, but I’m not. It’s a bit like watching your two best friends get married but you know that one of them is just going to eat the other one (apparently my friends are praying mantis).

But wait, how do you know Twitter will just kill Posterous? Well for starters, if Posterous employees will be put on Twitter projects who’s going to run Posterous?

Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.

And why else would they even mention plans to let you migrate your content?

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption. We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.

And if this doesn’t sound like a goodbye, I don’t know what does:

The last four years have been an amazing journey. Your encouragement, praise and criticism have made us better.  Thanks for that. We look forward to building great things for you over at Twitter.

Startup Biz PlanBut Twitter buying a blogging service was something that I anticipated four years ago. In fact I was so confident of the fact that I almost started my own blogging service with the plan of being acquired by Twitter. Ultimately I decide it wasn’t the right time for me to build a startup and now I’m glad I didn’t, because Twitter isn’t looking at expanding their service with Posterous, they just want the engineering talent. So now @agarwal get’s to go from being the founder and CEO of Posterous to being a product manager at Twitter.

Man, that’s one hell of a way to get a J-O-B. Nothing against Twitter or Project Managers, but I don’t hear many CEO’s walking around saying: “After I flip this bitch, I want to be a project manager.”

So why would you sell something you put your life into for four years just to let Twitter kill it? Well the answer is that it was probably dead anyway. Posterous has always had a little bit of envy when it came to their competitor Tumblr. Tumblr gets all the street cred with the hipsters and Posterous gets a few geeks like me.  Posterous even had a whole marketing initiative encouraging people to import their content from other “dying” services like Blogger and Tumblr. But they’ve never really been able to compete against Tumblr.

Late last year, Posterous decided to “pivot” to Posterous Spaces where they would focus on “normal” users, and not only did it not help them against Tumblr but it seems like they zigged, when they should have zagged. Here’s the numbers immediately following said pivot.

Oh snap! That sucks. Granted it was during the holidays and we don’t have the data from the last few months, but let’s compare Tumblr’s numbers during the same time.

<cough>ass kicking<cough> Oh yeah that’s right, Posterous and Tumbr are both services where “normal” users can share photos and stuff and during the holiday’s even “normal” people were sharing shed loads of photo’s.

Posterous should have stuck with their strength which was being a really good content management system for the Web.

I wonder if @ staff will refer to the time before they acquired @ as "preposterous".
March 12, 2012 2:10 pm via YoruFukurouReplyRetweetFavorite
@thomasborowski
Thomas Borowski

I know I’ve come across pretty harsh in this post (I even cursed, something I don’t do *in print* very often), but I’m feeling a little jilted. I’m a little bitter. With so many on my favorite startups being acquired and then killed I think I’m developing abandonment issues. (Hey at least there’s still FriendFeed.)

I know how hard it is to build a company and I appreciate all the effort Sachin and the Posterous team have put in over the last four years and I am glad that if Posterous really was doomed that they all found a soft landing at Twitter.

But if you’ll excuse me I have about a dozen Posterous sites to migrate now.

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About Tac Anderson

Social media anthropologist. Communications strategist. Business model junkie. Chief blogger here at New Comm Biz.
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  • Dennis McDonald

    I feel the same way. I’ve thought that Posterous’ days were numbered for a long time though, especially after the “Spaces” migration. Their iPhone app is pretty weak, too. My fear is based on what Twitter did to DabbleDB after the DabbleDB team was bought out — the best and most elegant online database bit the dust and I have yet to find a replacement. I assume the same will be true of Posterous, sadly.

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

    Given Twitter’s history with acquisitions (Backtype, Flurther, Summify, DabbleDB and many others) it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen. Even the true acquisitions Twitter has made in Summize (their first acquisition), which became Twitter search and more recently Tweetdeck, I’m still not optimistic, even if they did have any intention of letting Posterous continue to run. Twitter search is probably the best integration of a product and Tweetdeck has only suffered since the acquisition. It looks like I’ll be relying on Tumblr and ifttt.com a lot more than I already do. 

  • http://twitter.com/dweingrod Dan Weingrod

    Sadly I agree wholeheartedly. I always loved Posterous, especially its much simpler UI and ease of accomplishing tasks. I thought the iPhone app, last I used it, was terrific.  I edited a month of the 3six5 on it, much of it remotely and it was much easier than accomplishing the same task on Tumblr. “Spaces” was obviously the pre-obituary notice. To your point, moving it into a more corporate content creation/blogging sphere may have been the best route, but all to often its not the best product that wins.

  • http://www.ornitorrincoenlinea.com Angel B

    I am also a great Posterous fan. If it goes under, it will be a terrible blow. Even my mom has a Posterous blog and she loves it, so does my wife. I cannot think of an easier blog platform for non-techies.

    Hoping against hope that Posterous will somehow survive even in a zombified state (ala Friendfeed) but these talent acquisitions usually spell death for the bought platform/application. Only Google does a worse job than Twitter in handling bought properties, I think.

    I wish I could be more glad for the Posterous team, but as a user I cannot. Hope this at least makes Twitter better somehow, but even if it does we will have paid a terrible price.

    I need a drink :(

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

    Managing Posterous was/is super easy. I think it speaks volumes to the founders past experience at Apple. I did not understand at all the move to spaces but since it didn’t effect me much I just kind of ignored it and kept doing what I was doing. The market for a feature rich, easy to use, hosted blogging platform is rapidly dwindling. 

  • http://www.newcommbiz.com/ tacanderson

    Maybe we’ll get lucky and Posterous/Twitter will open source the code for Posterous. I don’t know who would pick it up, but it’s probably a more likely solution than Twitter leaving Posterous up and running. 

    The fact that FriendFeed is still functioning just baffles me. I think the founders must have worked something into the purchase agreement. I can’t imagine it will last much longer. 

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