Twitter Acqui-Hire A New Team To Improve Conversations On Its Platform

In its next attempt to make conversations on its platform easier to follow and more engaging for users, Twitter is making another acquihire. In particular, the micro-blogging site has picked up the Lightwell team, a startup which had created a set of developer tools for building narratives, interactive apps.

Suzanne Xie, the startup’s CEO and founder, will work as a director of product at Twitter and lead Conversations initiative while the other three team members will join her on those conversations project.

The acquihire was announced a couple of days ago by Twitter Vice President of product Keith Coleman and Lightwell. A spokesperson from Twitter:

Notably, it looks like the social network is on a product hiring push. Besides this latest deal, the company also hires Tom Hauburger and Angela Wise, both of whom are from autonomous firms, Voyage, and Waymo, respectively.

However, the latest event is like an acqui-hire rather than hire: just the Lightwell team is joining Twitter. The startup’s product will not be developed anymore, but it won’t go away either. It was noted by Xie that the apps that they have already built or had plans to build will continue to work. These apps will also be free.

Founded in 2012, Lightwell originally was under the name Hullabalu, a company that produces original-content interactive stories for children on tablets and smartphones. Their products stood out for distinctive characters as well as the way they presented the narratives: part interactive game, part book, the stories engaged kids and kept the stories going by getting users to touch and drag items on the screen.

After a few years, the company spotted an opportunity in packaging its technology as well as making it a platform for developers, children’s content creators, advertisers, etc., to use. At the time, the company seems to put its main focus on Lightwell.

The Hullabalu apps stayed on Apple’s App Store even after the company changed its focus. Nevertheless, it hasn’t updated the apps in two years. As a startup, Lightwell went through TechStars, YCombinator, and raised around $6.5 million from various investors like Scout Ventures, Great Oak, Spark Labs, Vayner, SV Angel, and Joanne Wilson.

If it was a pivot to turn Hullabalu into Lightwell, exiting to Twitter can be seen as the next interesting shift in optimizing the talent and expertise for one end to meet the needs of another.

One of the biggest challenges Twitter has been facing over the years is to make conversations on its platform easy for users to follow. The trickiest part in this problem is that the platform is about rivers of chatter in real-time flowing in a single feed; meanwhile, conversations should still linger around a certain topic and get hard to follow once too many people join the thread. The company has struggled to balance the two concepts for a while now.

Hopefully, adding a new team will help Twitter get a different perspective on approaching conversations considering Lightwell has been working on creative ways for presenting its narratives to users.