By Barbara Krasnoff (@BarbaraKrasnoff / ) - March 13, 2012.
Here we go again.
A friend emailed me this morning with a link to an article headlined "Twitter acquires Posterous." No comment, just that. And even before I read the article and then went to Posterous to read the official announcement, I knew that I was going to be moving my blogs once again.
A somewhat ironic situation for somebody who has just edited an article on blogging services.
This won't have been the first time. I have a couple of personal websites that I try to maintain in reasonably up-to-date fashion, but because I have a full time job and a fairly busy life, I can't spend as much time as I'd like updating them. Back before blogs were common and you had to tweak the HTML code to keep your site current, I had a tendency to let them get almost unbearably out of date.
Around 2006, Google announced that it was starting a new service called Google Page Creator, which would let people create simple blogs without fuss and bother. I played with it a little, and decided it was just the thing for my long-neglected sites. It was quick, it was painless, and I could set it up so it wrote content directly to my domain. I designed the pages to my satisfaction and began using Page Creator.
Then in 2008, Google decided to shut down Page Creator and migrate its users to Google Sites. I wasn't very happy with Sites, and spent a lot of time and effort finding another service that I could use without fuss and bother. After a bit of trial and error, I finally settled on Posterous. It wouldn't write content directly to my domain, but I could redirect to it, and it handily sent copies of my blogs to several social networking services. Home at last. I designed the pages to my satisfaction and began using Posterous.
Until now.
The announcement on the Posterous site explains how excited the owners of Posterous are by their new opportunity, how there will be ample notice of any changes in the service and clear instructions on moving content within the next few weeks, and how much they look forward to "building great things for you over at Twitter."
They don't explicitly say that Posterous is going to languish and eventually become an ex-service, a short and occasionally visited entry in Wikipedia, but the writing on the wall seems fairly clear.
I'm happy for the folks at Posterous. They built a great service and deserve any success they get in their future lives. But it's a pain in the neck for their users, who will have to start looking around for alternatives. Hopefully, alternatives that will last for more than a couple of years.
I wonder if WordPress is planning to be acquired any time soon...?