Twitter Buys Microblogging Site Posterous

The nanocontent company Twitter is buying the microblog site Posterous, according to posts on both services. Terms of the deal are not yet public. Posterous is a blog platform with a focus on simplicity. Like competitor Tumblr, it's designed so users can quickly create short posts. Items can be posted from the Web, the Posterous mobile app, or from e-mail.

The announcement posts say that the Posterous service Spaces will stay up and running "without disruption," but that users who wish to move off the system will get instructions for doing that shortly. The posts also say that the team is hiring.

The company launched out of Y Combinator in 2008. It went through a major conceptual redesign in September of 2011, with the launch of the Spaces product. Spaces layered a social architecture onto the platform, aping in some ways the Twitter concept of "subscribing" to other users' feeds. In addition to letting users read any other public content, the Spaces product was designed to give users a sense of community and reciprocal sharing.