Posterous is Joining the Flock at Twitter
Big news: Posterous has been acquired by Twitter! — The opportunities in front of Twitter are exciting, and we couldn't be happier about bringing our team's expertise to a product that reaches hundreds of millions of users around the globe.
Context & Ripple Effects
Posterous spent its four-year run simplifying publishing — launching group blogs on email-posting back in December 2008, adding site theming in 2009, and pitching its iPhone app in 2010 as the only sharing tool needed. The acquisition lands weeks after Twitter's own publicity push, with a Bloomberg Businessweek cover declaring the company 'has finally turned a corner' and an executive calling it a juggernaut.
The deal is also Twitter's second known talent buy in under a year, following its July 2011 acquisition of analytics startup BackType — a pattern echoed across the space when bitly picked up Twitterfeed last August. Eight outlets from CNET to Computerworld to The Next Web carried today's announcement, a sign the deal reads less as a product play than as a signal about where Twitter is heading.
First-order effects
- The Posterous team moves to Twitter, where the company says it will work on a product reaching hundreds of millions of users rather than its own blogging platform.
Second-order effects
- Posterous users and the independent blogging ecosystem now face open questions about the platform's roadmap and support, since the announcement commits only the team, not the service.
Third-order effects
- If the BackType-then-Posterous sequence holds, Twitter is building by absorbing small sharing-and-publishing teams wholesale — pushing standalone lightweight publishing tools toward acqui-hire exits or shutdowns rather than independent scale.
The trend: Consumer web consolidation circa 2012 is running on acqui-hires, with large social platforms like Twitter absorbing small publishing and sharing startups for their teams while their products wind down.