Twitter has acquired a video chat and screen-sharing startup
Twitter has acquired a video chat and screen-sharing startup
Twitter has announced that it has acquired video chat app Squad, and the company is already hinting at bringing the app’s group video chat feature to your Twitter feed.
Squad was an app that allowed users to share their screens on their mobile or desktop while in a group video chat. According to TechCrunch, the app has been shut down by Twitter and CEO Esther Crawford will instead be leading a product in the conversations space.
Ilya Brown from Twitter’s Product team shared the news in a tweet last Friday. Brown wrote, “excited to share that the @squad team is joining @Twitter to help us bring new ways for people to interact, express themselves, and join in the public conversation”.
While Squad was shut down on December 12, Brown wrote that interactive audio and video chats are an “important pillar” in the type of conversations Twitter is hoping to introduce, hinting that we could see a similar feature hit the social media platform soon.
They’ll join our product, design, and eng teams and help accelerate our work to bring people new and creative tools to start and join conversations on the service. Welcome to our squad, team!
— Ilya Brown (@ilyabr0wn) December 11, 2020
Related: What are fleets?
A group video chat tool wouldn’t be the first new feature to change the way that users interact with each other on Twitter.
The app launched its fleets feature last month, allowing users to share their thoughts in a temporary, story-like format. Fleets allow users to share text, images and videos with custom backgrounds that automatically disappear after 24 hours.
Users can see who has viewed their fleets, as well as respond to other people’s fleets via direct message.
Twitter is the latest in a long line of apps to introduce its own story feature, following on from the likes of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook.
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Twitter also announced that stickers and live broadcasting will be coming to fleets in the future, adding to the ways that users will soon be able to share their thoughts via video.
We’ll have to wait and see whether Twitter releases a Squad-like video and screen-sharing app in the future.
