My Desultory Blog

Twitter Buys Into Blogging With Posterous

Twitter said Monday that it has acquired micro-blogging service Posterous, but will leave it up and running.

Both companies announced the acquisition in a pair of blog posts that were posted Monday.

“Today we are welcoming a very talented group from Posterous to Twitter,” Twitter said in its post. “This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the Web and mobile devices simple—a goal we share. Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

Posterous, founded in 2008, is a simple blogging platform, known for its mobile app. The company’s entire purpose in life is to “help you share easier,” the company has said – somewhat mirroring the goal of Twitter, whose entire platform is built upon users sharing short bursts of content and pictures. Although Twitter recently integrated photo and video support, it still lacks the ability to share photo galleries. Posterous also includes the ability to add posts by email.

“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,” Posterous said in a blog post. “Plus, the people at Twitter are genuinely nice folks who share our vision for making sharing simpler.”

Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption, Posterous added. “We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service,” the service said. “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.”

Of late, Twitter has been said to be redoing its brand pages. It’s also unclear if Twitter will pull back Posterous content from search engines; the company licenses its stream of tweets to Microsoft’s Bing, and most recently, Russian search engine Yandex, but does not make them available to Google.