Just in time for Posterous’ closure on April 30th, a service has launched to bring Posterous blogs over to rival service, Tumblr.
JustMigrate was announced the same day that Posterous unceremoniously called it quits via its blog. The service requires you to punch in your posterous URL, authorize it with Tumblr, and you’re all set. For those with multiple Tumblr blogs, granting JustMigrate access via your primary Tumblr will bring you to a page where you can select which blog you want to port over to.
Moving 100 posts is free, and it’s $10 for 250 and $25 for 500 posts. Tumblr’s API allows 250 posts, or 75 photo posts to be uploaded daily, so JustMigrate will queue posts over days if you have a large Posterous blog.
The service was created by 3Crumbs, a five-man team out of India that has produced a mobile shopping app. Its co-founder, Siddarth Menon, said the idea to create Posterous porting tool was conceived in December, during a hackathon. The startup is bootstrapped, and he hopes the service will bring in some revenue to help support 3Crumbs’ shopping app.
Since the service was announced less than a day ago, about 150 blogs are now waiting in line to get ported. Menon said former New York Times design director and Mixel co-creator, Khoi Vinh, has had his Posterous that has been ported.
JustMigrate’s team should brace itself for a lot more migrations to happen. Back in 2011, Posterous said it had 12.3 million blogs on the site, most of them by individual users.
JustMigrate’s entrance couldn’t be timelier. Last march, when Posterous announced its team was getting acquired by Twitter, founder Sachin Agarwal said his team would provide “ample notice” if the service was going to get closed, and also promised tools to export content to other services such as Tumblr and WordPress “in the coming weeks”.
Sadly, the Posterous team remained silent on those tools, and nine months later in December offered a way for users to download their entire archives as a huge zip file, instead. The lack of tools was especially disappointing, given that the service had initially acquired its users by providing a robust tool to port your existing blog over from services such as Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger and even custom self-hosted blogs.
Posterous’ last blog post pointed to WordPress and Squarespace’s existing porting tools, before it bid its adieu.