Posterous acquired by Twitter

In a small way, every talent acquisition poisons the well for future, bootstrapped startups.<p>It erodes the confidence of users and potential customers. People put their company blog on Posterous, they add their business to GoWalla, they gave AdGrok a few hours of their time, etcetera, etcetera.<p>I'm not saying I would turn down the offer. But I fear the long-term effect of all these acqui-hires is my potential customers saying "No thanks. I doubt you geeks will be around in 18 months" when I market to them.

From their acquisition FAQ: "We’ll give you ample notice before any changes to the service and we’ll share clear instructions about how to move your content to other services. In the meantime, your Spaces will remain up and running without disruption."<p>Sounds like posterous is not long for this world. This is a bummer, I really like posterous.

This would mean that prior to this acquisition, Twitter was preposterous.<p>&#60;/ducks&#62;

Seems strange for a company this "developed" to go as part of a talent acquisition, does this imply that the company doesn't see a way to grow beyond what it is now and believes that what it is now isn't <i>good enough</i> to warrant continuing on with the option to join Twitter? Although I guess 4 years isn't that old in the grand scheme of things.

Does anyone else see this as a YC/VC-success but a business-failure? I'd be far more impressed if they grew Posterous into a <i>profitable</i> company. And so this team is moving from one unprofitable company to another. Disappointing :(

Looks like it was your time to move on, Posterous!<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455593" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1455593</a><p>If I worked at Tumblr, I'd put the blog post in my link in a glass frame.

This reminds me of a blog post from Maciej, the creator of Pinboard, regarding why sometimes free services aren't all they're cracked up to be: <a href="http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/</a>

The FAQ was reallly difficult to gauge the overall direction that Posterous is headed.<p>I use Posterous for my personal and startup blogs.<p>Reading the Posterous FAQ, they barely use any "exciting" colloquialisms. Everything is cast in a shadow of uncertainty. In fact, I would probably go far as saying this is one of the worst acquisition FAQ's I've read. I'm very pleased for the Posterous team, but you haven't <i>truely</i> given any insight as to where you plan to be in 6 months from now.<p>Some startups are just "aqhirisations", and from a cynical reading this sounds all too familiar.<p>I could be wrong, and perhaps the author of that article just never read Shakespeare, because right now I can see the clouds overhead.

This simply means that Twitter will fill its own void of 140 characters and above space. I think it's a win-win for everyone. Without more-than-140-characters, the Twitter remains simply the link sharing platform. With a blogging service attached to its hip, they (Twitter) can compete with FB and Google Plus.

This is a bit odd to me as an acquisition. It's unlikely to be a talent acquisition given the userbase/brand of posterous, but the two product doesn't seem to mesh at all IMO. Does anyone have a theory as to what's the synergy behind these two companies that could justify an acquisition?

Is Twitter profitable? It seems one company without a business model acquires another company without business model?

Horrible. Do founders not care about their own products anymore? Or is this just forced-by-the-VCs?<p>I don't generally mind when this happens with a services firm, or a tool with very few users, but Posterous? We all moved our Wordpresses there. True enough, we all got it for free so we can't complain, but I can't help feel that the Posterous owners let something lovely fly. Ahwell, no 10x ROI eh?

Begin countdown until shutdown...

Score one more for people and organizations who invested in running their own site on their own servers (or vm instances).

As a startup employee, I'm curious to know how much do employees stand to gain from such talent acquisitions?

Congrats to Good/Real Sachin, Garry, and all the rest of the team!

I would have paid for their service. What happens to my blog now? Will all those links get /dev/nulled? Or are we gonna get to set up some 301's?

This makes you wonder about the current supply of talented developers. Where has that supply gone?<p>I see no reason why Twitter would aquire Posterous for any reason other than the experience that the staff have. As far as I am aware Posterous doesn't hold any valued patents. It doesn't appear to be leading the way in pioneering technology. I don't really see how the site itself fits in with Twitter's strategy.<p>It looks like a smash and grab to get more staff. Is this a statement about the typically applicant Twitter recieves when looking to hire? Its also a shame as aquisition's like this are happening more and more often killing off fairly popular websites in the process.

As a long time posterous user I'm not happy about this - twitter will put posterous in maintenance mode.<p>I've decided to do something about it<p>I've setup <a href="http://p.ostero.us" rel="nofollow">http://p.ostero.us</a> A paid Octpress based blogging service for the ex-posterous users - using an awesome blog platform - makes money - and thats not ganna get purchased and killed off<p>Hopefully this will help other posterous user wondering where to go<p>* <a href="http://p.ostero.us" rel="nofollow">http://p.ostero.us</a> * <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3713092</a>

I was an early user of Posterous and got our whole company to setup multiple sub-domains when each of us tweeted out photos. At the time it was the best because you didn't have any ads showing up alongside a photo (like twitpic). Im sad to see posterous otherwise give up and just move to twitter. I feel like if they would have kept innovating 2-3 or so years ago then they would be at a much better place. What are their goals before they got bought? It wasnt clear to me.

Congrats Posterous! IMO, this is one of the best teams around and Twitter will be lucky to have them on board.

This was very much expected.Posterous was apparently not doing well. Compared to tumblr, it was to hard to post content. With not much an engaging user base compared to tumblr or wordpress, posterous acquistion by someother company was expected.

Is acquihire just a Silicon Valley concept? Where I'm from, a big company is probably gonna offer you a massive salary rather than buy out a product with no potential.

I am bummed, I liked the Posterous interface pretty nicely.

Apart from the employees from posterous, does posterous as a business/brand make sense for twitter? Quite frankly, i don't see any synergies.. Any thoughts..

Can anyone suggest a way to port your posterous blog to tumblr, retaining the url's and the comments (i believe tumblr uses disqus for comments) ?

So what would the right approach be, and who would be best to approach Twitter, to convince Twitter to open source the Posterous code?

Great. I feel happy for the Posterous guys. Many congratulations!

I guess it's too late to apply.

Amazing, a top 500 global site (roughly), that appears likely to just close up shop. What the hell is that?<p>Hey Twitter, how about you give me the platform, we'll split 50/50 anything I make with it, I'll assume all the downside liability.<p>Posterous can go a lot further. This is a failure of imagination.

Congrats Sachin and team.<p>HN Y U SO HATE?

This is indeed big news.

So now when I tweet, will it push that tweet to Twitter so all my Twitter followers will know that I tweeted?