Twitter is Availing the Services of "Highly" team to make the Platform more Conversational!

Gone are the days when article links were sufficient to grab someone’s attention and make them open the articles. Nowadays, quotes are more mainstream and visually pleasing. Twitter has realized this and has wasted no time in making it clear that it is acqui-hiring the team behind Highly, a highlight-sharing app.

This acqui-hire will definitely help Twitter either in creating its own version of Highly or just use the team to develop strategies to identify and highlight the best content from the article.

It should be noted that Highly will be terminating its iOS and Slack app in a week (April 26th, to be precise). However, the founder of Highly, Andrew Courter has assured its users that no existing highlights shall be affected. In addition to that, paid features such as “Crowd Control” used for private highlights, and the Team feature, will also be made free meanwhile.

Highly team is also in favor of the deal and they wrote about effectiveness of Social highlights in giving people shared context and sparking meaningful conversations.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to any social media savvy that quotes are way well-received than links these days, especially on social media services like Twitter. Users do not like to open a link and leave the platform they were surfing so if there is something that can grab their attention and make them click/tap on the link, then it has to be through a brief snippet, which can give users a glimpse of the article, and prove its worth.


This is where Highly comes into play. With this tool, you can simply select the text that you think will make an excellent snippet, and it will turn into an image, with a backlink to the article. Moreover, the browser extensions or the app itself, can help you in highlighting text from literally anywhere.

Twitter acqui-hires highlight-sharing app Highly

Thus, the Highly team believes in sharing highlights instead of headlines and also that it can work with Twitter to improve the conditions and effectiveness of conversations. This will also result in Twitter moving over to algorithmic ranking of the timeline, which will in turn encourage more people to create catchy tweets to increase user engagement.

Read next: Twitter’s beta Twttr app is even more popular than the main app
Previous Post Next Post