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Twitter continues news product push with Brief acquisition

The purchase is part of the company's bigger push into news subscription services.

An iPhone with the Twitter logo on the screen.

Twitter is acqui-hiring subscription news app Brief.

Photo: Sara Kurfeß/Unsplash

Twitter will acqui-hire subscription-based news app Brief, the company announced Tuesday, as the social media platform continues to dig deep into acquisitions and news product offerings.

The news app's team will join Twitter's Experience unit, including Brief co-founders Nick Hobbs and Andrea Huey. Hobbs also served as Brief's designer, and before that he worked as a product manager at Google. Huey previously worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Google.

Twitter will continue to "attract talent that will complement our teams and help accelerate our work to both broaden the spectrums of conversations people can have on Twitter," the company said.

Brief will phase out its app for subscribers on Saturday, and current subscribers received notice of the acquisition on Tuesday. A company spokesperson declined to share the cost of the purchase.

Twitter is chasing down new acquisitions, scooping up seven companies already this year. In January alone, the company picked up podcasting app Breaker, creative service agency Ueno, startup DriveScale and newsletter platform Revue. Since then, Twitter welcomed API integration platform Reshuffle in March and bought the news reader service Scroll in May.

Sarah Roach

Sarah (Sarahroach_) writes for Source Code at Protocol. She's based in Boston and can be reached at sroach@protocol.com

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