Twitter

Twitter Buys Screen-Sharing Social App Squad

Twitter has acquired Squad, a Silicon Valley startup that gives people the ability to hang out virtually with friends on other apps, Squad announced in a blog post.

Squad will help Twitter “bring new ways for people to interact, express themselves, and join in the public conversation,” Twitter Vice President of Product Ilya Brown wrote in a tweet. 

The Squad team brings “a deep understanding of how people participate in interactive audio and video conversations” and will “accelerate our work to bring people new and creative tools to start and join conversations on the service,” Brown added in follow-up tweets.

“Four and a half years ago when my cofounder Ethan Sutin and I started the company we were determined to build a consumer social product whose purpose and mission was rooted in facilitating authentic connection. We saw the problem of loneliness and wanted to use technology to help solve it,” Squad Co-Founder and CEO Esther Crawford wrote in the blog post.

Squad launched in early 2019 with a “vision of reimagining live conversational formats” she said, but after the pandemic hit, “it took on an entirely different and more vital role. It wasn’t just something people wanted — now it was what they needed,” Crawford wrote.

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