Twitter has gained Slack-like messaging app Quill with an eye toward further developing messaging services, including direct messages, the organization reported Tuesday. In a tweet thread reporting the deal, Nick Caldwell, general manager for core tech at Twitter, portrayed 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.”
Plume will close down, yet its team will join Twitter’s Experience organization. The terms of the deal were not unveiled. A goodbye blog post on Quill’s updates website gave instructions to clients who want to send out their team message histories, which will be accessible until 1 PM PT on December 11th. By then, Quill will turn off its servers and deleting all information. Active clients will be given full refunds, the organization 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 established by Ludwig Pettersson, former creative director of payments processing platform Stripe. Pettersson will join Twitter’s Conversations team under Oji Udezue.
The platform was worked for work discussions yet with controls over some of the features that make Slack a distracting time suck. Its structured channels considered more focused discussions than the traditional reverse chron chat thread, and message threads could be parted and moved into separate discussions.
