It was just a matter of time before Twitter shut the blogging platform Posterous down, after acquiring the company last March. The team had already been folded into the flock, but this means that nobody has to worry about pesky service interruptions of keeping the service’s diminishing number of users happy. The site will be shutting down on April 30th, but it’s not a completely sad story.
Have no fear, Posterous co-founder Garry Tan is coming to the rescue with a new site called Posthaven, which he promises will never shut down. Here’s what Tan had to say about the launch when we spoke to him:
I’m teaming up with another cofounder 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.
Tan tells us that Posthaven will never accept funding and will be available to its users “forever.”
Here’s what the Posterous/Twitter team had to say about the shutdown, along with instructions on how to get your data:
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.
As Twitter delves into how to make discovery easier for its users, some of the findings learned by Posterous will most definitely come into play. On the other hand, it’s nice to know that there’s an easy way to move your information, with one of Posterous’ co-founders providing the service “from the heart.”
Posthaven is currently taking reservations for its service, so grab your name.
UPDATE: It looks like Posthaven is having difficulties managing all of the attention:
Please bear with us through the 503 errors -- we're working to fix Posthaven asap. (We had no idea Posterous would announce today.)
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Garry Tan (@garrytan) February 15, 2013[Photo credit: Flickr]
Posterous emerged from Y Combinator in the summer of 2008 as an innovative company focused on making blogging simple - as simple as sending an email - and now has more than 15 million monthly users. With the launch of Posterous Spaces, the company is bringing its trademark simplicity to help people share smarter with intuitive privacy controls to share selectively across multiple platforms.
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
Garry Tan is a Partner at Y Combinator, previously Designer-in-Residence. He was a cofounder at Posterous, cofounded the financial analysis platform at Palantir Technologies and was a Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Mobile. He graduated from Stanford in Computer Systems Engineering in 2003.
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