Twitter has just announced that it has acquired the popular blogging platform Posterous. It will keep Posterous running as it is and not make any changes for the moment but we should not rule out changes for Posterous users in the future.
Acquisition are usually either defensive or growth oriented. Last year Twitter bought TweetDeck to make sure that UberMedia did not get it. It was a way to ensure UberMedia did not own too much of Twitter related platforms.
Posterous on the other hand is an aggressive acquisition. It will probably fuel newer features on Twitter or maybe Posterous could be used to share posts longer than 140 characters.
Posterous is a popular blogging platform, even though it was not as popular as WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr. Probably that the reason it was up for acquisition. On the other hand it could mean a lot of things for Twitter.
The Challenges for Twitter
Even though Google+ might have been created as a balance for Facebook, it has also indirectly laid out challenges to Twitter. It has borrowed a lot of ideas from Twitter including introducing hashtags. Even Facebook is breathing down Twitter neck with ideas to get into the allowing feeds based on interests.
So it will be interesting to watch what Twitter churns out and also to see if Posterous can make a bit of a comeback as a blogging platform.
What are your views on Twitter acquiring Posterous? Do drop in your comments.
2 Comments
If twitter doesn’t kill/ignore posterous like what was done with tweetdeck, I’m sure the twitter+posterous duo will pawn google+ and facebook. If only twitter doesn’t kill/ignore posterous, that is.
@Murugappan: That is a very good point. But considering with so much competition in social media and also Twitter is not exactly the most profitable business out there, I doubt they would spend millions to buy something to ignore it. But then stranger things do happen. 😀