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Comment by 4eleven7 | Hacker News Reader

First Sphere (https://www.sphere.me), now Quill. Twitter is obviously planning something in this space, but to me, Twitter's magic is in the ability to really consume a lot, from experts, in a short space of time (240 character brevity!).

In depth conversation, spaces, voice, don't really belong on Twitter in my opinion, but I'm sure Twitter knows better than me... I have no skin in that game!

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Idk maybe I'm still sour after they killed "We are hunted" 10y ago, but I feel Twitter acquired a number of companies and yet remained virtually unchanged for years.

They acquired WAH to merge it into Twitter Music that they later killed. They bought Vine and wasted its potential, idk if Periscope is still alive or not (also acquired).

Maybe this time it'll be different - their recent acquisitions of Revue and Chroma Labs (which I guess became Twitter Spaces) seems to be kind of working so far

A lot of people use Twitter DMs and complain about that experience having room to improve (e.g. being able to search DMs). Maybe some of these acqui-hires (and that's what they seem to be) will be toward improving DMs?

Well not letting people export and purging all Quill DMs is not a good start.

Choosing not to let your manager see your DMs seems like a strict improvement over Slack.

I guess I’m just horrified at the thought that Twitter needs to acquire a company to figure out how to search DMs.

My thoughts exactly.

I'm a customer of a company where I recently requested a relatively basic feature. They said they were putting together a team to implement it. That was bad.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems to need to buy a company in order to improve a basic feature. That's horrible!

What's up with management culture in tech companies!?

Buying a company is often a very efficient way of getting something built. The price may be lower than you think and they get a team that's already worked together and isn't bogged down by internal Twitter politics. If the executive running the acquisition can protect the team from those politics they can get something built faster than they would otherwise, and at $10m Twitter revenue per day, getting something out the door faster has a lot of value.

Yeah, I would agree if it's just for adding search haha. I'm speculating they might have larger ambitions there.

Twitter doesn't really understand what made it so successful. What did it start as but a blogging service limited to 140 characters? That's why they are so resistant to change. So they're looking for a company that has a user experience that the trust, not just spinning up a crew to spit out a feature.

Ah, what a great blogging service. /1

@jack(ass)'s announcement that he was quitting Twitter was a tweet of... a fucking screenshot of a wordy e-mail.

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