Twitter, the America based microblogging and social networking service acquired Squad, a screen sharing social app. This acquisition doesn’t include the Squad app, but just the co-founders of Squad being CEO Esther Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team.
Instead, the company has announced that with the acquisition, the app will be shutting down tomorrow, a disappointing surprise for its user base largely made up of teen girls. This is surprising to many, including myself, since Squad could have been a perfect addition to Twitter.
But this is nothing new for the social media giant, as Vine too was infamously shut down after being acquired by the company. Moreover, earlier this month, Twitter had terminated its experimental twttr application as well.
Squad was notably partnered close to Snap and was quick in adopting many of the company’s Snap Kit developer tools. This can make porting the tech to Twitter’s infrastructure a more difficult task, as it is closely related to Snapchat user graph.
“When we launched in early 2019 we thought the vision of reimagining live conversational formats was important but after the pandemic hit in 2020 it took on an entirely different and more vital role. It wasn’t just something people wanted — now it was what they needed,” said Esther Crawford in a post on Medium.
Esther Crawford was one of the first YouTube creators to land a six-figure brand sponsorship, and she held senior product marketing roles with companies including Circle, Coach.me and Stride Labs. While Ethan Sutin is a full-stack engineer who was the technical lead on Harvard University’s Implicit Bias Project.
“Excited to share that the Squad team is joining Twitter to help us deliver new ways for people to interact, express themselves and participate in the public conversation. Squad’s talented team, led by Esther Crawford and Ethan Sutin, bring a deep understanding of how people engage in interactive audio and video conversations – an important pillar in the spectrum of conversations we seek to serve on Twitter” said Twitter’s vice president of product Ilya Brown in a couple of tweets.
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.
— Ilya Brown (@ilyabr0wn) December 11, 2020
