Today, Quill announced that Twitter has acquired the business communication app. Quill, in its current form, will shut down officially at 1 p.m. PST on Saturday, December 11, 2011. Until then, users can export their team messages. After that date, Quill said it will shut down their servers and delete all user data. Active teams will receive full refunds. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We started Quill with the goal of increasing the quality of human communication. We believe the tools we use to communicate today are not the best they can be. Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal — to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone,” Quill said in a December 7, 2021 announcement.

“We’d like to thank everybody who has used Quill — if you came on board during our beta, or if you just sent your first message last week. We can’t wait to show you what we’ll be working on next,” said the Quill team.

Quill’s strengths

Quill’s strength as a business communication app lies in its simplicity. Similar to competitors like Slack, Quill organizes conversations in threads that are organized and “discoverable.” Quill says this helps teams stay focused. The messaging app includes an Activity Feed where users can archive, snooze or participate in conversations. Notifications can also be tailored to suit a user’s needs, like other collaboration tools. The app also offers social channels for casual conversations, video chat, voice channels, file sharing, integrations with other tools, and more.

What’s next?

This is Twitter’s first deal under new CEO Parag Agrawal, who took over for Jack Dorsey last week. TechCrunch, who first shared the news, said that while Quill may be shutting down, its team and its intellectual property will join Twitter. TechCrunch says they will join Twitter’s Experience division to work on Twitter direct messages with founder Ludwig Petterson leading the team. What exactly they will be doing and how this could reshape Twitter DMs and conversations remains to be seen.

However, this move is consistent with other Twitter moves this year, all with the purpose of moving away from the company’s dependence on advertising and sponsorship revenue by diversifying with new products and services. This includes offering paid newsletters through Revue, which Twitter bought in January and new subscription features and tools like Super Follow and Twitter Blue. Twitter is slowly rolling out new tools, testing them with in specific markets with limited user groups first, as any smart subscription company would do.

Insider Take

Twitter has made some big moves this year with perhaps the biggest being Jack Dorsey’s departure from the CEO seat. That said, his successor is already stepping into his new role and making moves himself, though the Quill deal was probably already in the works. Over the next six to 12 months, it will be interesting to see which of Twitter’s experiments and acquisitions will bear fruit and how Agrawal’s leadership style will differ from Dorsey’s. We are expecting similar acquisitions, tools and testing next year. What’s coming next?