If you’re a developer building an app on the Evernote platform, probably pretty good — and pretty possible.

Today, Evernote is launching Evernote Accelerator, an extension of the company’s extensive existing developer relations program.  It’s a no-equity program that Evernote, with Docomo and Honda, is setting up to promote and build the Evernote platform.

“We pay all the expenses,” Evernote’s Rafe Needleman told me yesterday. “You might be a team in China … we’ll fly you out, give you a place to live, provide office space, feed you — the Evernote lunches are awesome — put you through a startup curriculum, give you both private and public work group sessions with our developers, and even set up a Demo Day for local Silicon Valley investors and press.”

The Evernote platform currently handles six billion API calls a month and is the common backend for all eight official Evernote apps: the original note-taking Evernote, the recently-acquired draw-it-quick app Skitch, and others. Third-party apps in Evernote’s app store — The Trunk — use the exact same API.

And the company wants more of them.

“There’s a million different ways to store, use, and get access to personal and private data, and so far we’ve only built eight of those apps,” Needleman says.

So Evernote wants developers to add to its growing catalog, which currently features apps integrating if this then that, the Bamboo drawing tablet, read-it-later Android app Pocket, and blogging software Squarespace, among others, into the Evernote ecosystem of all the details, ideas, and clippings that you want to remember.

The process usually starts with Evernote hackathons held around the world, and used to culminate in what the company calls DevCup — a challenge to create the best apps for Evernote, coming up this year on June 28.

For 2013, however, Evernote is adding the accelerator program, in which the company will pick six winning teams from the DevCup to join them at Evernote headquarters in Silicon Valley to spend a month polishing their app and building an actual business from it.

For developers, it’s a complete win.

“We’re not taking an investment stake,” Needleman told me. “A good Evernote integration is the best possible win for us.”

Of course, one of the concerns developers have when building on another company’s platform, using their API, is what the terms and conditions are. Twitter, which restricted how developers could access and use its platform last year, recently shut down Ribbon’s in-stream commerce technology just 90 minutes after it launched.

That will not be a problem with the Evernote platform, said Needleman.

“The more cool things people do on the Evernote platform, the better it is for users and the better it is for us,” he said. “Developers can do whatever they want. We don’t mine Evernote users’ data, and we don’t make money from Evernote users except for the premium service, so anything goes, pretty much.”

Teams that enter the Evernote Accelerator will also be working with Docomo Innovation Ventures and Honda Silicon Valley Labs, so any apps that have mobile or transportation capabilities have the opportunity to rub shoulders with those innovators and investors, and potentially have a path to distribution or monetization.

What kind of apps is Evernote looking for?

“I have no idea what we’re going to see,” Needleman said. “Last year we saw a bunch of stuff we’d never expected, including an Evernote client for feature phones for Brazil.”

In other words, anything goes. Bring your creativity, and you might just have a shot at building a business.

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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