With a heavy heart, life after Posterous

I’ve been a Posterous advocate for some time now and my loyalty to the platform only grew the more I used it. It wasn’t without its problems (themes, for a start), but when it came to posting & sharing, Posterous stood out on platform and features. I ran four different blogs on Posterous — what-was-this-blog, food, corporate and more recently, a collection of pictures — and converted a few people to it as well.

Something I’m yet to see in any other platform is how well Posterous managed sharing. The ability for group blogs to have posts shared to a group account and people’s personal accounts was pretty solid, not to mention Posterous’ autoposting capabilities. For example, I never once manually uploaded a picture to my Flickr in over two years but I have a full photo history there.

Sadly, their Twitter acquisition has changed all of this.

As Twitter tends to do, they hired the Posterous team for talent, which is great and I’m really happy for the guys too — I’ve followed some of them and know them to be driven individuals who care about their products.

But I also know that Posterous will not develop new features for the foreseeable future. This is a problem in and of itself. What’s more, existing things are starting to break (or being intentionally deactivated, I’m not really sure) and there’s no one supporting that.

At first I thought my big question would be where do I go. Oddly enough, that decision didn’t take long, but I learnt that the real question was how.

Wordpress is the only platform that has a Posterous importer that actually works but I had/have no interest in moving there.^[1]

I have no inclination to maintain a self-hosted break-fix blog and .com tends to be a little limited with the kind of tweaks I like to have. Plus, my blog is a lot about bits and pieces, thoughts and observations, a link here, a picture there and for that, Tumblr actually does a significantly better job, while managing the environment for me. So this is where I am today.

In fun timing, Tumblr’s recent post:

Tumblr has broken into the Top 10 sites in the U.S., and now has a worldwide audience of 170 million people.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve moved my blogs and have started a shutdown of the old. The blog & feed URL will stay in case there are people that do actually read along.

At the rate the migration occurred, I think I will be annoyed enough to write out a post talking about how this was accomplished, because it is in fact turning out to be a rather woeful experience. More on that later.

To Posterous. The platform that was.

Update, 15 Feb 2013: As expected, Posterous will shut down April 30.