Instead of setting up a longer living backup for each case, it would be interesting to setup a generic storage mirror and a corporate foundation that can keep these sites alive.
When a startup shuts down a product, they can donate the domain name or point it to the mirror to keep it alive.
Something like archive.org, with some donated servers and a couple of people working on it.
Twitter and other acquirers usually only want the team, and this is happening more and more. We are losing large parts of the web. I wouldn't be surprised if less than 1% of Posterous is exported and goes to live on in other forms. Either way the URLs and links all die.
I've been keeping reocities alive out of pocket. It costs a few hundred every month in hosting costs and another few hundred in machine write-offs. I got about .37 in bitcoin donations, so I'm a bit short still :) But I think it is well worth doing. I assume hosing posterous would cost a lot more than that so I'd have to find some funding but I'm pretty sure this could be done.
I'd be more than happy to help out if Twitter are willing to do it with Posterous. Register a non-profit and then go out and approach some of the larger co's for funds and/or resources to keep it running forever.
Make static backups of these sites using their sitemaps[0] and then ask them to donate or point their domains
This is going to ravage blog links on search engines. Not sure why this wasn't announced a year back (although it was widely known this would happen eventually).
Everyone who joined Twitter was handsomely rewarded for their hard work and their accomplishments at Posterous. We're taking much of what we built at Posterous to make Twitter a more powerful platform.
If the employees simply got to keep their job, they wouldn't have accepted the Twitter offer and instead have joined another startup. There are plenty of great opportunities out there.
easy there bro. There were already restrictions on education purchases when I did this. I worked with the bookstore director directly to buy in volume. It was all in the open.
You can still use Posterous Spaces as a public blog. Each space can be public or private.
We're solving a similar problem as google circles. The basic difference is that Posterous Spaces are symmetric sharing so all members of a space can post.
I see your trying to leverage the existing posterous to do it, which is good from the perspective of getting it going but could easily alienate a portion of the user base that were sold on the dead simple blogging message.
Sure these changes may still allow them to do the same thing but the shift in terminology and organisation will be hinting to people the direct things are going which is away from their use case.
Granted this new niche might be a good direction, the HN crowd are hardly a good sample of opinions for something like this.
Thanks for the comment. Nothing has changed with how you can use Posterous for Sites or Groups. It's simpler, cleaner, better designed, more user focused, better mobile app, and a strong social layer.
We found our users loved having more control over how they share online. So instead of having 2 products, we simplified into one to rule them all.
