Twitter buys would-be Slack competitor Quill | Engadget

You might not have heard of messaging service Quill, but it surely was positioned as a Discord- or Slack-style app for staff communications that attempted to be much less noisy and extra structured. The platform solely launched this past February, however as we speak Twitter has announce it’s buying Quill and shutting it down this weekend. Twitter’s tech GM Nick Caldwell introduced the transfer this morning, and Quill confirmed the news in a weblog put up by itself website.

The proven fact that it is shutting down this weekend is a stunningly quick turn-around; Quill is providing particulars on the best way to export information, which any staff utilizing it’ll in all probability need to do ASAP. (They’ll additionally need to go and discover a new messaging service to make use of post-haste.) 

The app had billed itself as “messaging for people that focus,” and it is not clear how that mission will proceed as a part of Twitter. Caldwell stated that the objective was to have the Quill staff assist “make messaging tools like DMs a more useful & expressive way people can have conversations.” Chances are good that is extra of an acqui-hire scenario, wherein Twitter needed to have the Quill staff engaged on Twitter’s present merchandise. Given how briskly Quill is shutting down, it is fairly clear Twitter would not have any curiosity in spending assets on that present product.

It’s the second main acquisition Twitter has made within the final month or so — in mid-November, Twitter bought Threader, a preferred software that pulled threads of tweets collectively into a neater to learn format. Just just like the Quill buy, Twitter did not waste a lot time shutting down Threader — the app is about to vanish on December fifteenth. (At least it obtained an extended lease on life than Quill.) Threader is anticipated to be rolled into the Twitter Blue subscription service; we’ll must see if a few of Quill’s legacy finally ends up there, as properly.