Detailed on the official Posterous blog earlier today, CEO Sachin Agarwal announced that the blogging service will be turned off on April 30, 2013. According to the details within the post, the entire team that was working on Posterous will be shifted to projects related to the continued development of Twitter. Twitter purchased Posterous during March 2012 for an undisclosed sum, but allowed the service to continue operating over the last twelve months. At the time of purchase, Posterous had approximately fifteen million unique users.
However, there have been indications that Twitter was working towards the closure of the blogging platform. The Posterous team recently launched a way for users to export their entire library of posts to other blogging platforms such as Tumblr and WordPress.
In addition, the development team stopped accepting new users into the Posterous Spaces program. Agarwal also recommends that users utilize the content import tools offered by WordPress and Squarespace to create duplicate blogs.
On April 30, all mobile applications and Posterous.com will become completely unavailable to users. Basically, Posterous Spaces will disappear from the Web. Businesses like Airbnb, Mailchimp and Tweetdeck will be forced to shift all blog content to a new platform since those Spaces pages will be closed down.
If you have a Posterous blog, you can save your content by going to posterous.com/#backup, logging into the service and clicking “Request Backup” next to the name of your space. When the backup is ready to be downloaded, the user will receive an email with instructions how to save all of their blog’s content.
As a farewell to the all loyal users, Agarwal stated “We’d like to thank the millions of Posterous users who have supported us on our incredible journey. We hope to provide you with as easy a transition as possible, and look forward to seeing you on Twitter. Thank you.”