The super-simple blogging engine that evolved from blogging by email to private photo and note sharing, but never managed to compete with the high-flying Tumblr, is being shut down. The team will now focus 100 percent on Twitter, the company said in a blog post.

Posterous had been acquired by Twitter in March of last year for undisclosed — read small  – terms, and will be shut down almost exactly a year after the deal closed. It had taken on a total of $15 million of venture capital from Redpoint Ventures and other participants in, ironically, March 2010, and had 12 million monthly unique visitors at that point.

But that number has been dropping, and while it still has a not-insignificant 1.33 million monthly visitors, Tumble is growing through 26 million currently, and WordPress.com is perennially in the 30 million range.

Source: Compete.com

Posterous web traffic

From Twitter’s perspective, I guess, once you do the aqui-hire is complete and you have the hires, why keep the acqui?

Interestingly, the instructions the miniblogging service is providing to Posterous users detailing how to export their posts into other blogging hosts do not mention Tumblr, though they do mention WordPress and SquareSpace. Could there be some lingering bitterness?

In any case, it’s a sad day for Posterous users who remain, and those of us who appreciated the site’s dream of simple blogging and sharing.

Here’s the full announcement:

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:

1. Go to 
   http://posterous.com/#backup
   .
2. Click to request a backup of your Space by clicking “Request Backup” next to your Space name.
3. When your backup is ready, you’ll receive an email.
4. 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

photo credit: dyniss via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Hyperlocal news business EveryBlock, an early pioneer in data-driven news aggregation, has been shut down by parent NBC News, it announced today.

EveryBlock launched in late 2007 with the promise of aggregating community news you’d want to know about. It was acquired by MSNBC in 2009 and later went under NBC’s control after MSNBC.com became fully owned by NBC.

The company says that “massive” changes happening in the news industry (most likely the inability to make much money from advertising) was the reason it shut down. It writes in a blog post today:

We’re sorry to report that EveryBlock has closed its doors.

It’s no secret that the news industry is in the midst of a massive change. Within the world of neighborhood news there’s an exciting pace of innovation yet increasing challenges to building a profitable business. Though EveryBlock has been able to build an engaged community over the years, we’re faced with the decision to wrap things up.

Thank you for having let us play a role in how you get your neighborhood news. Thanks for the contributions, for the questions, and for allowing us to connect you to each other, in many cases to make great things happen in your community. Along the way, we hope we’ve helped you be a better neighbor.

While EveryBlock could have potentially been saved by selling it off or asking for community donations (something like what Andrew Sullivan did or a Kickstarter campaign), NBC News says it did not see any other option for EveryBlock besides simply shutting it down.

“I understand that the EveryBlock community is disappointed,” Vivian Schiller, SVP and chief digital officer of NBC News, told Poynter. “So are we. We looked at various options to keep this going, but none of them were viable. It was a tough call to make.”

Disappointed may be an understatement. The post announcing the site’s closing currently has more than 530 comments. The highest-rated comment is a complaint about how the community received no warning about the shutdown, leaving them with no ability to save information or stay in touch with other members of the community:

Thanks for just turning it off with zero warning or notice. Thanks for letting us get contact information for friends we had made on the site. Thanks for letting us copy information and threads that we wanted to keep.

This was handled extremely poorly.

Closed sign photo via FrancescoCorticchia /Shutterstock

Today, Google announced it will shut down social question-and-answer service Aardvark at the end of September.

Aardvark will join several other soon-to-be-discontinued services as part of the closing of Google Labs.

“Aardvark began as a small experiment in a new kind of social search and over a few years blossomed into a service that made millions of connections between people to answer each other’s questions,” an Aardvark spokesperson wrote in a blog post today.

“It was a great experience in seeking to combine a broad vision for the future of technology with a rigorous user-centered design process. Over this time, we learned a lot about creating and maintaining online communities and how to facilitate sharing of knowledge between people.”

Under the direction of new CEO Larry Page, Google declared that it would re-prioritize its product offerings. Part of that includes the shut down of Google Labs, what Google previously referred to as “a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototypes of some of our wild and crazy ideas.”

Aardvark was acquired by Google for $50 million back in February 2010. The service let users ask and answer questions from people in their personal social network through a Google Chat window. A day after the acquisition news came through, Aardvark was moved to Google Labs.

Google says although Aardvark is closing, Google will “continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.” The Aardvark team appears to have moved most of its focus to the Google+ social network.

“It has been gratifying to see how well [Google+] is doing. Even in these early stages, Google+ has already become a great place to share knowledge online, eclipsing the original vark.com! And there is much more to come very soon,” the Aardvark rep wrote.

“In this and other projects at Google, the Aardvark team remains committed to developing powerful tools for connecting people and improving access to information.”

Did you ever use Aardvark? Are you sad to see it go?