Posterous closing down on April 30

As many of you have heard, Posterous would be closing their doors on the 30th of April. Which, to me is quite saddening.

When I first migrated to Rome, I wanted to do microblogging. At the time, my main computer was still under custody of the Italian Post, but I still wanted to share some of the random, interesting daily snaps of my life using my camera phone at the very least.

Like, why is this poor bra left hanging on a tree by itself?

Comparing how fuel costs (Wow, it was much cheaper then in 2009!)

And this interesting custom for kids to dress up in costumes before Lent.

Anyway, I was using a Samsung Innov8 at the time, and then moved to Nokia E72 and at this point, I’m using a Samsung Galaxy Nexus.

Posterous was pretty easy to use, and all you had to do was to write an email, attach one or as many pictures as you liked and send it to post@posterous.com.

I loved how beautiful and clean the interface looked like. It was like, every function was thought of from a user’s viewpoint. It wasn’t confusing and it just … worked! The image gallery for example, was simply beautiful.

There wasn’t a need to embed videos and audio from external websites (although you could do that) as Posterous deals with it by itself.

And I liked that for every new post that you do, it will autoposts links to your social media sites, like twitter, plurk and facebook. Which was very convenient, you didn’t have to take the additional steps, linking here and there. And I think for being in 2009, this feature was pretty innovative.

To top it all, the people at Posterous were really friendly too – I even got a reply from THE founder, Sachin Agarwal himself, which to me, is quite big (Maybe I should write to my favourite actors and writers too and see if they write back, haha!)

Of course, since then, new services emerged, like the wildly popular Instagram. While I enjoy playing with the filters and peek into my friends’s pictorial updates, Instagram doesn’t allow me to stick a code in it for checking stats (don’t judge me) and when it wouldn’t embed my pictures into twitter which quite turned me off, even before the picture selling scandal.

So it was natural to go back to Posterous. And then the news of them closing down. How sad. Almost poetic even.

Anyway, I’ve already done a backup and am still considering and weighing the pros and cons on to which site I could use to replace it.

Oh wow, 600 megs of memories. I cannot emphasize enough that it is such a shame that Posterous had to close down. I know for some, it is quite silly to be sad and to be emotional over the loss of a website. But when you invest time, and moments and memories into something, you’re bound to feel nostalgic about it. It is like discovering your old diary at 12 years old and remembering the silly and fun things that you did at the time and how things have changed since then.

To me, Posterous was a wonderful platform and a worthy rival to Tumblr – clean, classy and has a sort of simple sophistication. In any case, I would like to wish all the best, and many many thank yous to Sachin and all the staff at Posterous for giving me the joy of expressing myself.

To end, I’m putting up a screenshot of my very first entry in posterous 4 years ago :

Bye bye! You will be remembered!

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy my tribute to :

• 12seconds.tv
• Geocities
• Joost
• There.com