Posterous goes out; closing on April 30th

Posterous – a blogging platform – when started, was one of the most revolutionary.  It offered a lot of new features.  The best being that you could create a blog for yourself, just by sending a blog by email.  The email to blogging interface was probably best explored by Posterous!  The company was acquired by Twitter and is now closing.

The service had suffered a lot of issues in the last year after being acquired by Twitter, like the infamous over 17 hour outage due to lost databases.

Going offline is the nightmare-scenario for blogging platforms and it is one that Tumblr-rival Posterous has suffered from today (Asia time – overnight US time) after the company – bought by Twitter in March – lost “multiple” databases, taking its service offline for 17.5 hours.

The team, which was led by an Indian – Sachin Agrawal – will now be focusing on Twitter completely.  An email to this effect came to all those who had at one time of the other started a blog on Posterous.

Posterous launched in 2008. Our mission was to make it easier to share photos and connect with your social networks. Since joining Twitter almost one year ago, we’ve been able to continue that journey, building features to help you discover and share what’s happening in the world – on an even larger scale.

On April 30th, we will turn off posterous.com and our mobile apps in order to focus 100% of our efforts on Twitter. This means that as of April 30, Posterous Spaces will no longer be available either to view or to edit.

Right now and over the next couple months until April 30th, you can download all of your Posterous Spaces including your photos, videos, and documents.

Here are the steps:

• Go to http://posterous.com/#backup.

• Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.

• When your backup is ready, you’ll receive an email.

• Return to http://posterous.com/#backup to download a .zip file.

If you want to move your site to another service, WordPress and Squarespace offer importers that can move all of your content over to either service. Just remember: you need to back up your Spaces by April 30.

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.

Sachin Agarwal, Founder and CEO

Well, hopefully the owners made their money after sale to Twitter, although the users will surely have a tough time in future.