Twitter buys Threader to further improve its Blue subscription product

Twitter, which launched its paid subscription product Blue in America and New Zealand last week, announced yesterday that it is acquiring Threader, a third-party freemium app which allows users to compile Twitter threads.  

For those unfamiliar, when users reply to a thread, by tagging Threader’s profile and writing the word “compile,” the bot condenses a series of tweets into an easier to read article-like form.

“Threader was born 4 years ago from an assessment. At the time, threads were not widely used. We noticed the kind of amazing content shared by people on Twitter who worked around the 280 character limit to express longer thoughts, but they were hard to find and even more difficult to read. We felt a desire to highlight these great stories and knowledge shared on the platform. “ Threader said in a blog post. 

Twitter’s $2.99 monthly paid subscription product Blue that provides exclusive access to premium content also offers a Threader-like feature called Reader mode which compiles threads into an easy-to-read format. Twitter said Threader co-founder Marie Denis helped develop the Reader feature. 

As part of the acquisition, Threader app will shut down on December 15, 2021 and its features will be available on Twitter Blue. 

This isn’t Twitter’s first acquisition this year. Announcing its Revue and Breaker acquisitions in January, Twitter also announced last month that it has acquired the group chat app Sphere.