“Another one bites the dust” and so Posterous Space would bid adieu come 30 April 2013. Fortunately for me, I didn’t really use this service in a big way. Thus it was not a big loss for me. The way social services closing down their doors one after another seemed to be the trend recently.

I suppose free is not a good business model. Eventually they have to come up with some kind of monetizing method in one way or another. Take Linkedin for instance, sure they are very popular among the working professionals trying to link up with other working professionals, eventually they have go for advertising revenue.

If advertising was not the way, the other alternative was to create premium accounts to gain access to better features of the online service that you offer. Such as Evernote, Livejournal, WordPress, etc where they offer premium offerings to gain access to additional features should the user want it or found it useful, they would pay for it.

Anyway, the concept of Posterous was to sent a post via email to Posterous and it would post up into your Posterous blog. At the same time, if you have set up your Posterous account to re-distribute it to your other blog accounts be it WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, etc it would do so. So a would be blogger would not need to individually post the same article to his various blog that he owns. It was a good idea at that time and could have helped out in your article marketing and some benefit to your SEO strategy. Of course Google then came up with Google Panda and Penguin and in one fell swoop made such a move a bad SEO strategy and backfiring to your SEO effort.

Anyway, the founder of Posterous did made some money by selling their Posterous to Twitter sometime in March 2012. But looks like the Twitter people couldn’t find a good use for this concept and that’s the end of that!

As per their email that I received:

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.

Anyway, I did have quite a fair amount of quick post during the few years run and Posterous provided a way to back up and re-post my old posting. So were some of their explanation to the steps to do so:

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

Anyway, my posts were way too short for any significance. That’s what happens when you blog with your mobile while on the run. For sentimentality, I guess I will just publish verbatim from their backup file without any modification. Makes for a very rough website, it will just have to do for now.

If you are curious about those posts of mine, you could find them here: My old Posterous blog post

And of course, relying on free service has the risk of their services closing down on you. Free is not a good business model although it is nice to have free service, eventually the people serving up free services need a source of income or they would just simply pack up and close their doors. If they were kind enough to inform you, you could still salvage your stuffs, or they could quietly quit like HelloTxt for instance with nary a sound from them and just gone without a word.

Cheers!