Twitter has closed the deal to acquire the group chat messenger Sphere. Through the purchase, the social network plans to increase the popularity of communities of interest. The amount of the deal was not disclosed. Twitter previously announced the closure of the Scroll service, which the company bought in May 2021. The social network has integrated the functionality of the service into a paid subscription.
The Sphere Messenger app itself will now stop offline. The entire startup team will continue to work already within the framework of cooperation with Twitter.
The function of creating groups of interests appeared on Twitter in September 2021. Community members can see all messages in the group and write to each other. Each group is led by a separate moderator who sets the rules and monitors them, as well as invites and removes users.
The Sphere service allows you to automatically delete old chats, highlight important messages for each participant and make it possible to thank the most active users with stickers.
Sphere was founded by Thomas Khalgash and Nick D'Aloisio. At the age of 17, D'Aloisio created the news application Summly, which was bought by Yahoo in 2013 for $ 30 million. According to the SME publication, Halgash became the first Slovak who managed to develop and sell his startup idea to a major technology company.
Sphere has attracted investments from Index Ventures, Horizons Ventures, Mike Moritz (one of the first investors in Google), Brian Chesky (founder of Airbnb) and Sean Rad (founder of Tinder).
In early October, it became known that Twitter decided to close the Scroll service, which turns off ads from publications and gives them a part of the money for each user. Social media bought the startup in May 2021. But now its functionality will only be available in the Twitter Blue subscription. In Russia it costs 269 rubles a month.
Earlier, “Secret” wrote that Twitter has introduced a new feature that allows users to independently remove their own subscribers, without blocking them, as they had to do before. The press service of the company added that the remote subscriber will not receive notifications about this. To get rid of an unwanted person, you need to go to the “Subscribers” section, find him there and select “Remove this subscriber”.
Photo: Pixabay, Pixabay License
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