Posterous gobbles up fellow Y Combinator alum Slinkset

June 25, 2009 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

Posterous, the blogging service that lets you submit entries via email or text message, has acquired Slinkset, a platform for enabling users to vote web content and comments up or down — like on popular social news like Reddit. The deal is interesting because both startups were born out of seed-stage incubator Y Combinator last year.

The buy will allow Posterous to expand into social news aggregation, the company says. But instead of simply presenting news items and links in the order they appear as Google News and most RSS readers do, it will give users the ability to vote for the items that are most relevant or interesting to them, resulting in a crowd-sourced list of the most popular stories and sites.

Earlier this week, Posterous announced an import feature, allowing new users to move the content from their old dead blogs from Wordpress, Blogger, or other platforms to their new sites. Based in San Francisco, the company says it sees blogging as being closely tied to social media aggregation and sharing because both are about new content discovery for users. And because Posterous lets users blog via email and text, it lowers the technical barriers to finding exciting new content.

Slinkset’s acquisition should give Posterous an advantage over competitors like Tumblr, Typepad and the like, which have not branched into this area. The company also recently announced support for the iPhone 3GS.

Posterous raised $750,000 in seed round last year from high profile angels including Guy Kawasaki, Mitch Kapor and Aydin Senkut.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

With GreenBeat 2009, VentureBeat's all-star conference on all things Smart Grid, coming up in November, Camille will be expanding coverage of this exciting space. Stay up to date by following @greenbeat2009 on Twitter or by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook here.

  • "Gobbles Up" awesome :)