Posterous Raises $5 Million | Hacker News Reader

Posterous Raises $5 Million

techcrunch.com

I love Posterous as a blogging platform and totally understand why they'd want to expand to a wider audience. But I just hope they don't get rid of the old experience. I don't understand why the service isn't just called Posterous with a Spaces feature?

Not sure i'd use the social features much but as long as the original blogging features are continued to be developed in the fashion they are now i'll be happy.

Maybe it's that the spaces at their core are like Private blogs for certain groups of people. The fact it's called spaces (like G+ Circles) has scared people into thinking it's building itself into a full social networking platform.

Question to the crowd.

I am perplexed how such information becomes public. Does it get published by VCs or firms themselves? What's the advantage making this information public?

In the United States, there's reporting requirements when selling stock and raising private equity - you have to file something called a Form D with the SEC.

Typically these files are public - see formds.com for examples, although I didn't see Posterous when I searched there (maybe they announced ahead of the filing).

Since these things are going to be made public anyway, there's no reason why you wouldn't shape the story yourself with a press release beforehand.

Techcrunch used to get a lot of funding scoops by scanning the D filings RSS feeds. Now everybody else has pretty much figured that out as well

Some companies have different parent entities that take on the money. If you scan all the D's you can usually pick out the tech companies because of their funky holding company names.

"What's the advantage making this information public?"

Publicity and notoriety.

And not having your business destroyed by the SEC.

Is it just me or was it a god-awful write-up. There is very little extra information in this article other than the headline. What happened to researching, talking to people and writing a good article?

They just want to position themselves to get acquired by Google. It's a smart strategy, I admit. Though I think Posterous is starting to become a solution in search of a problem.

Is the plan B of all startups to convert their services into a photo-sharing social network?

Particularly if they want to be bought into plus.google.com's team.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com