social media — Todoleo Tech Blog

The Posterous blogging platform will be shutting down on April 30th 2013. Since being acquired (or acqu-hired) by Twitter in March 2012, there have been few feature updates to the service.

On February 15th 2013 Sachin Agarwal, founder and CEO of Posterous, published a page linked to from the landing page with the announcement and instructions on how to export data from the service. The announcement itself follows.

Posterous will turn off on April 30

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

So there goes another social media service. Tumblr seems to have won this section of the market, and definitely seems to have more traction.

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions below. Here's a link to my practically unused Posterous space too.

Here's a clever marketing scheme that actually gives out something useful to a community: Ronseal UK's Project Playground. On Facebook, Ronseal UK is running a competition for schools. Whichever school playground in their photos gets more Facebook "Likes" wins a £30000 playground makeover.

Here's the official speil from Ronseal UK:
"We have teamed up with the market leader in play equipment manufacturing, Timberline, to give one lucky primary school or nursery in the UK the ultimate playground makeover. If you don’t currently have an outdoor play area or think your play equipment is in need of attention, we want to hear from you. With hundreds of schools suffering as a result of Government spending cuts your current playground may be affected. Whether it is tired and outdated or there simply isn’t enough to keep everyone occupied at playtime, whatever the problem Ronseal, in partnership with Timberline, is here to help."

This is, in my view, a very opportunistic, clever and low cost marketing scheme. Parents, children and entire communities have been very involved in getting it to go viral on both Facebook and the rest of the web.

Usually I discourage people from using Facebook's "Like" button, for various reasons. In this case I encourage you to do so because I am personally supporting one of my local schools: Murrayburn Primary School, Edinburgh.

If you are a Facebook user and would like to help Murrayburn Primary School, please go to the Ronseal UK Facebook page and "Like" it. Once you've done that, please also "Like" the picture of how Murrayburn Primary School's playground currently looks. (It's the third image in the album) This counts as a vote.

Please place your vote for Murrayburn Primary School as soon as you can, the voting closes on July 15th 2011 at midnight in the UK. Thanks in advance!

As usual, feel free to post comments/questions and Google +1 this article...