Twitter's New Acqui-Hire Deal Signals Major Change In How We Tweet

Apparently, people are more appealed to quotes from articles than links on Twitter. Therefore, the social platform is getting the team behind Highly – the highlight sharing app, with the hope to develop a Highly version of its own or create other tools to grab the greatest content from sites and bring it to the feed.

The news was confirmed as Twitter told TechCrunch that it was an acqui-hire deal with a statement from the company spokesperson. The spokesperson shared that the company is excited to take in the Highly team with their expertise that will promote its design and product thinking around making the platform more conversational. The publication also asked what options for data portability that Highly will offer.

So apparently, on April 26, Highly will shut down its Slack and iOS app while promising that “No highlights will be harmed.” In the meantime, it will make Highly For Teams and “Crowd Control” free, which is a previously paid app for sharing highlights privately.

According to the Highly team, with social highlights, sharing stories on the Internet feels alive, personal, and efficient, just like when you retell a story to your friends during a hangout. The team writes that the platform provides people with shared context while sparking meaningful conversations.

Instead of passing a link because they don’t want to exit Twitter just to read an article, quotes will make users grab the idea of the article and help them decide to or not to dive deeper into the content.

A lot of people use OneShot to get a screenshot of posts with the Twitter format. Highly, on the other hand, lets users simply rub their fingers over the text and it will turn into a picture with a backlink direct to the original article, making tweeting easier. Plus, users can search the history of their past highlights as well as follow curators that find that best quotes. People can highlight both on Highly’s app and its web version.

The Highly team says:

Therefore, Highly is partnering with Twitter to improve conversation health.

With this change, every post has to compete to be seen on Twitter. And it will also help Twitter increase user engagement. If the social platform can integrate these tools into its app, it can let more users generate appealing tweets and get themselves heard.