Twitter says it has acquired highlight sharing app Highly, which will shut down its iOS and Slack app on April 26
Quotes from articles are much more eye-catching than links on Twitter, so the social giant is scooping up the team behind highlight-sharing app Highly.
Context & Ripple Effects
Twitter has been running the same play since it hired ex-Google product director Keith Coleman by acquiring Yes Inc. and shutting down Yes's apps in 2016 — buy a small team building a sharing or communication feature, absorb them into the core product, kill the standalone app within weeks. The Yes acquisition set that template.
Highly fits the mold exactly: TechCrunch frames the deal around quotes being more eye-catching than plain links on Twitter, so the team joins to sharpen how shared content looks, while users of the iOS and Slack apps get an April 26 shutdown date. The same script later ran with podcasting (Breaker, whose team went to build Spaces), screen-sharing app Squad, news summary app Brief, and messaging app Quill.
First-order effects
- Highly's users lose both the iOS app and its Slack integration on April 26, and the founding team moves inside Twitter to work on quote presentation rather than a standalone product.
Second-order effects
- Slack loses a third-party highlight-sharing app from its ecosystem, thinning the integrations layer that makes chat platforms sticky — a dynamic Twitter itself later tested from the other side when it bought Quill out of the Slack-competitive space.
Third-order effects
- If the Yes-to-Highly-to-Breaker/Squad/Brief/Quill sequence holds, small consumer and collaboration apps increasingly function as talent on-ramps for large platforms rather than durable businesses, concentrating feature innovation inside a handful of acquirers.
The trend: Twitter is industrializing an acquire-the-team-shut-the-app playbook, converting niche sharing and communication startups into feature teams while their products disappear within weeks.