Posterous shuts down after Twitter acquisition AI-researched
Dependency: Posterous blogging platform Wikipedia
Posterous shut down on April 30, 2013, after its acquisition by Twitter; while text posts could be exported, media files hosted on the platform — audio, video, and images not mirrored elsewhere — were permanently lost for users who did not manually download them.
What changed
Posterous was a microblogging and media-sharing platform launched in 2008, notable for its ease of use: users could publish posts simply by emailing content to post@posterous.com. It attracted bloggers, photographers, podcasters, and artists who valued its frictionless publishing model. Twitter acquired the company in March 2012 as an acqui-hire, and on February 15, 2013, announced the service would shut down on April 30.
Users were given about ten weeks to export their content. WordPress and Squarespace built import tools, and Posterous co-founder Garry Tan launched Posthaven as a paid alternative that promised to never shut down. However, the export process had a critical limitation: when users imported posts into another blogging platform, only the text and metadata transferred. Audio files, video files, and some images that were hosted on Posterous servers were not included in the export and were lost when the servers went offline.
The Archive Team conducted a crawl of public Posterous sites before the deadline, preserving some content. But private posts, password-protected blogs, and any content not publicly accessible were beyond the reach of archival crawlers. The shutdown was a particularly sharp example of the acqui-hire pattern: a company buys a platform for its engineering talent, then discards the product and the user community that sustained it. For artists and independent creators who had used Posterous as their primary publishing platform, the shutdown meant rebuilding their online presence from scratch — if they had local copies of their work at all.