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Twitter buys blogging platform Posterous

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Twitter is taking the San Francisco startup Posterous under its wing.

On Monday, the two companies announced that Twitter had purchased Posterous for an undisclosed amount of money and that the team that built the Posterous Spaces blogging platform would now be working on Twitter products.

Spaces, a popular service in its own right with about 15 million users, won’t be going away anytime soon in the takeover, Twitter and Posterous said.

“Posterous Spaces will remain up and running without disruption,” the two companies said in a statement. “We’ll give users ample notice if we make any changes to the service. For users who would like to back up their content or move to another service, we’ll share clear instructions for doing so in the coming weeks.”

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But while Spaces won’t be shut down, Twitter made it clear that they were purchasing the talent that built the blogging platform that focuses on sharing to specific groups of friends and easily blogging from mobile phones, email and apps.

“This team has built an innovative product that makes sharing across the Web and mobile devices simple -- a goal we share,” Twitter said in a blog post. “Posterous engineers, product managers and others will join our teams working on several key initiatives that will make Twitter even better.”

What specifically the Posterous team would be working on at Twitter wasn’t detailed by either company.

Posterous was founded in 2008 out of the Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator off of about $15,000 in seed funding, according to CrunchBase.

Sachin Agarwal, Posterous’ founder and CEO, graduated from Stanford in 2002 with a computer science degree and was at Apple for six years as a software engineer working on the popular video editing software Final Cut Pro before starting the blogging platform.

On Monday, Agarwal said on his Spaces blog that Twitter buying Posterous was “one of the greatest days of my entire life.”

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At Twitter, Agarwal said he will work as a product manager.

“The people at Twitter are genuinely nice folks who share our vision for making sharing simpler,” he said. “Everyone is passionate, excited, and truly believes in the product and the leadership.”

Having worked at Apple before, Agarwal said he sees parallels in the way the iPhone maker and Twitter operate.

“Apple and Twitter have a lot in common: a great sense of product and design, amazing leadership, phenomenal growth, and a great culture. Of all the places I could imagine working, Twitter ranks the highest. (Think about how much I would hate working at Google!),” Agarwal said in his post.

“It’s fitting to be going to the only company Apple chooses to integrate deeply with. Apple has definitely picked a side in social networking, and it’s Twitter.”

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