In what come as a surprising development, Twitter was working on a standalone instant messaging app to complement the micro-blogging platform but the plans for this project were scraped. This messaging app would’ve intially been launched in emerging markets such as India, reports BuzzFeed News. It, however, had to be killed because of two reasons — failed user trial and closure of Bengaluru engineering center.
The report mentions that Twitter had been working on a standalone messaging app, which combined both tweets and messages into a single interface. This project was supposed to act as a new user on-ramp for the complete Twitter experience, which has been witnessing a stunted user growth for the last couple of years.
Sources familar with the development further told BuzzFeed that the messaging app was intended to be based on the concept of identifying ‘influencers’ around certain topics of interest — cricket, politics, football, etc. And then enabling the users to create groups to discuss these topics within the app with other Twitter users. The company was also adding the capability to follow accounts relevant to the topic to pull in tweets from their accounts and display them within the group. It would’ve been something similar to the Twitter integration within Slack.
The company has chosen India to trial its messaging app because there weren’t many users in the country and the popularity of messaging apps in the country. And this project would’ve enabled Twitter to bank upon this opportunity with the release of a coherent experience for their micro-blogging platform. Talking about the same, one of the anonymous sources working on the messaging app says,
Look, as a product, Twitter isn’t easy to figure out for most people. Everyone around us was hooked to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, and I think internally, there was some concern about how much people were engaging with those platforms versus ours. So instant messaging seemed like a natural choice to build something around.
The primary idea behind this now-dead application was to expose Indian users to the charm of Twitter and tweets without even onboarding them on the platform. The team believed that users would love the concept and eventually sign up for the platform and interact with people they followed on the messaging app. But the trials conducted by the company with a handful of college students didn’t pan out as expected.
Thus, work on the messaging app was closed after almost an year of development. This was further followed by layoffs, which cleared the entire Bengaluru team of twenty, including nine software engineers. The engineering centre in India was, thus, closed as part of the global workforce layoffs announced during the third quarter earnings call.
Vine, another of Twitter’s products, is receiving a similar treatment. It’s most likely due to a loss in traction, users and the platform’s stars when compared to Snapchat or Instagram. But the company has now announced that it isn’t exactly killing off the short-video platform. It will just shutdown the content part of the app and the same will now live as a standalone camera app.
