I had 6 blogs in syndication on blog platform Posterous until this morning when 4 of the 6 are unavailable on top of the fact that there have been reports for weeks that they stopped accepting new registrations. This all just a few months after being acquired by Twitter in an undisclosed deal. I luckily heeded their backup warnings and just last week downloaded all of my content. For once I didn’t get caught short! Yeah for me on that one after losing quite a bit of content when Amplify.com went dark and a ton of photos when Photobucket.com went down plus others over the years less dramatic and long ago accepted. It serves us all to remember that we must backup our content, especially that which is hosted on 3rd party/free networks like the previous examples. For me, Posterous was one that I invested heavily in. Six of my forty publications including my four flagship sites of:
www.sgbmediagroup.com
www.eroticfreepress.org
www.ampr.posterous.com
www.sgbportfolio.posterous.com
www.boardroomadvisers.com
www.swrereport.posterous.com
Three of them were top level domains which I can transfer to another host and upload my saved content with not a period disrupted. CNN had this to say about Twitter’s buyout of Posterous last March:
“Launched in 2008, Posterous — like its archrival Tumblr — pioneered the “microblogging” space. Its specialty is content that’s longer than a tweet but shorter than a traditional blog post. The services are especially good for sharing photos, videos, quotes and other multimedia snippets.”
The management there has been warning of the impending shutdown since the buyout almost one year now in such statements as:
“We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service,” Posterous wrote in a blog post announcing the takeover. “For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”
I’m still sad to see it go. Posterous was my much thought out 3rd place backup platform to my primary blog publishing patforms at Google’s Blogger.com and WordPress.com and as a self publishing platorm was relatively easy to navigate it’s backend although it did admittedly had it’s shortfalls like the inability to ad html code to sidebars, a limited selection of premade templates and always left one with the feeling that they had picked the modern equivelent of video formats “Beta Max” vs Tumblr’s “VHS”. It was cool, very Web 2.0 but not adopted by the cool kids in the same way that Tumblr was and since the two platforms were virtrualy identical in form and function I always had a sense that it’s run would be limited.
