Twitter buys Posterous

Here’s Twitter’s blog post on the deal, and Posterous’s post, too. This appears to be primarily a talent acquisition (“acq-hire”) and maybe — to a lesser extent — a technology acquisition, versus an audience or market share acquisition.

Both posts are predictably vague about what the Posterous team will be doing at Twitter, but here’s a not-so-wacky guess: Building out Twitter’s photo/video/link/multimedia sharing services. These are currently rudimentary, but they’re important in competition with Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other broad “sharing” services.

(Update: Another idea, via Hunter Walk: That Posterous could be working on brand profile pages, “since that’s where integration of media, commerce, tweets, etc is occurring”. Giving brands an easy way to build out more sophisticated Twitter profile pages than they have now is an obvious step, and Posterous did make it easy for people to make web pages. This makes sense, too.)