Twitter has acquired Slack-like messaging app Quill with an eye toward improving messaging services, including direct messages, the company announced Tuesday. In a tweet thread announcing the deal, Nick Caldwell, general manager for core tech at Twitter, described Quill as a “fresher, more deliberate way to communicate. We’re bringing their experience and creativity to Twitter as we work to make messaging tools like DMs a more useful & expressive way people can have conversations on the service.”
.@ludwig and his talented team built Quill as a fresher, more deliberate way to communicate. We’re bringing their experience and creativity to Twitter as we work to make messaging tools like DMs a more useful & expressive way people can have conversations on the service.
— Nick Caldwell (@nickcald) December 7, 2021
Quill will shut down, but its team will join Twitter’s Experience org. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A farewell blog post on Quill’s updates site provided instructions for users who want to export their team message histories, which will be available until 1PM PT on December 11th. At that point, Quill will be turning off its servers and deleting all data. Active customers will be issued full refunds, the company said.
“Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone,” the blog post reads.
Quill made its official launch in February, billing itself as “messaging for people that focus.” It was founded by Ludwig Pettersson, former creative director of payments processing platform Stripe. Pettersson will be joining Twitter’s Conversations team under Oji Udezue.
The platform was built for work conversations but with controls over some of the features that make Slack a distracting time suck. Its structured channels allowed for more focused conversations than the traditional reverse chron chat thread, and message threads could be split and moved into separate conversations.
