Squad, a screen-sharing social app, announced that is has been acquired by Twitter. As part of the acquisition, Squad will shut down the Squad app on December 12, 2020.
Esther Crawford, CEO of Squad, posted about this on Medium:
I’m excited to announce that Twitter has acquired Squad! The team will be joining Twitter to broaden the spectrum of conversations people can have on the service. Specifically, we’ll be bringing our expertise in audio and video to the creation space – and are looking forward to building new formats that allow for fun, meaningful & engaging conversations.
Ilya Brown, Twitter’s VP of product, tweeted: “Excited to share that the @squad team is joining @Twitter to help us bring new ways for people to interact, express themselves, and join in the public conversation.”
TechCrunch reported that Squad’s co-founders, CEO Ester Crawford and CTO Ethan Sutin, and the rest of the team will be coming aboard inside Twitter’s design, engineering, and art departments.
According to TechCrunch, the actual Squad app itself is not coming aboard Twitter. The Squad app allowed users to share their screens on mobile or desktop and simultaneously video chat, a feature that aimed to find the friend use case in screen-sharing beyond the enterprise use case of presenting.
The question now is: What will happen to Periscope? The Squad app is shutting down as of December 12, 2020, shortly after Twitter acquired it. Twitter shut down Vine four years after acquiring it. Periscope was acquired by Twitter in 2015 and has some functions that might be similar to what Squad offers. I guess we will have to wait and see what Periscope’s fate will be.