PostGhost
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
PostGhost ran a website that archived tweets deleted by verified public figures on Twitter. The service tracked verified users with more than 10,000 followers and preserved copies of their tweets after they were removed, presenting itself as a public record of statements made by politicians, celebrities and other influential figures.
02 / PostGhost FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
PostGhost was shut down by platform enforcement, not by the market. Its entire product depended on Twitter's API, and Twitter ordered it to stop archiving deleted tweets, calling the practice a violation of its developer terms. Without API access the archive could not function, and the three-day-old site had no way to fight the platform it depended on.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
PostGhost ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Launch a tweet archive that kept deleted tweets of verified public figures.
- 02
Grow quickly by surfacing removed statements from politicians and celebrities.
- 03
Receive a cease-and-desist from Twitter for violating API terms.
- 04
Shut down the service after only a few days, with no way to continue without Twitter's API.