Sphere - Acquired by Twitter 🌐

[robsug]

I used to draw these in Paint when I was younger

[simonb]

Hackathon Results are today at 6pm if anyone is free. I don’t know what the other teams have built, but my team is in it to win it with our idea

Our CEO Nick D’Aloisio will be hosting the event and Zoom attendees will be able to vote for the winner

Sphere Hackathon 2021 - The Results! - Zoom

[simonb]

A big day for us today! First, we launched our new website - take a look!

Sphere - Group Chat

Second, we went live with our latest feature, Zen Flow - an all new feed that keeps active conversations at the forefront, so you can focus on what matters. Inactive conversations expire after 24 hours of no activity (but can be reactivated from the All Chats page) - meaning you can focus on just what’s important and not be bogged down by an endless feed of old, dead chats. Check out the blog post for more info. We’ve also dropped a teaser in there for our next big feature, Appreciations, which is launching in the next few weeks!

Zen Flow, Appreciations, and more— Upgrade your group chat with a whole new...

[breville_monkey]

Just saw this thread. Sphere is a great idea imo, Whatsapp is terrible for group chats and organising things. And it’s Facebook.

Might see if I can convince a few groups I’m in to move over. The main barrier will be getting people to download a new app especially after my repeated failed campaigns to get people onto Signal and Discord. But I can try

[simonb]

Thank you so much! We just added some new onboarding upon sign up too to help users understand the feature set. Let me know if your groups have any questions, as we plan on adding more stuff to the website once we learn what kind of information people want to know - there’s a preliminary FAQ there, but we can always add more. We’re really proud of Zen Flow, as there’s no other messengers doing this - even smaller Discords that I’m in just have so many dead channels being shoved in your face all the time and it’s tough to know what’s what.

Appreciations is going to be fantastic too - it’s like a combination of Discord’s custom emojis but with Reddit’s reputation system, except all Appreciations are tailor made and named by the group creating them. I suspect we are going to see some hilarious Appreciation names pop up once it launches!

[simonb]

Super helpful feedback @N26throwaway - thanks so much! Maybe we can do a Do Not Disturb mode, or notification bundling when there’s bursts of activity. Have passed it on to the PMs to figure out

[StuartL (Stuart)]

I’m looking forward to being able to try this out with my friends group.

Currently we use a WhatsApp group chat for planning upcoming trips or get togethers but a lot of the important dates, times, questions etc. can get lost among the general chit chat, song/movie/tv show recommendations and whatnot. I think Sphere could solve some of the frustrations here.

[kolok]

Website looks really nice and clean, especially the font.

[bebbington]

The difficulty with messaging apps is there is too many (as mentioned by others).

We used to have open platforms where everyone was contactable (a phone number). Now it is so decentralised that you have group chats on a dozen different platforms.

If you could build a tool to connect all the messaging services you would be on to a winner. open banking for communication?

Circa 20 apps on my phone just to talk to friends

[simonb]

@N26throwaway

For me, it’s not for messaging my friends, it’s for the Sphere One community and the chat room spin that has on the sort of stuff you go to Discourse or Reddit for.

I think a large part of my liking of it, is that I was onboarded at the perfect time, so my first experience with Sphere was an event (WWDC), and that was awesome.

This is great to hear and glad you enjoyed the event! We will be doing more. I think this is really key in that “communities that do events” is our target audience more than friend groups. We have seen people set up friends and family groups on Sphere, so that’s why we included it as an example on the website, but ultimately it’s not who we are directly building the product for.

[bebbington]

I would love to stick to a few but entirely reliant on what others use. As you say WhatsApp is popular in the UK but still a lot don’t use it. Either I don’t stay in contact with them or I use another service?

There will certainly always be a place for niche services, but I struggle to see how a platform doesn’t make sense in the long term. For sure there a number of tough hurdles to overcome with E2E encryption, monetisation, etc.

Meanwhile I will continue to have all the comms apps on my phone (txt, phone, iMessage, whatsapp, messenger, snap, zoom, FaceTime, viber, signal, Skype, etc, etc.). And don’t even get me started on business communication software

[Peter_G]

Looks like there’s some interesting news from Sphere…

Sphere 💬

Sphere has joined Twitter! 🙌

… they’ve been acquired by Twitter!

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

Great news!

Shows how well they’ve done

[breville_monkey]

Congrats @simonb ! Your tech startup has graduated

[Peter_G]

I did have to read the announcement twice though - I thought they were tweeting to say they’d just signed up to Twitter

But yes, excellent news - must have been one of those buy 'em while we can still afford 'em things!

[neovo]

@Peter_G

I thought they were tweeting to say they’d just signed up to Twitter

This was my first thought

[lpoolrob (Rob)]

@N26throwaway

I’m curious what this will mean for the future of Sphere though.

The IP taken and the team quietly dropped over the next 12 months would be my guess. Quite often the way for small tech startups when acquired (despite how much they say it won’t happen!). That is not to say it is a bad thing of course (other than if jobs are lost).

[Peter_G]

@N26throwaway

I’m curious what this will mean for the future of Sphere though

I think the blog says they’re shutting the app down over the course of the coming month?

Edit: here it is:

While we’ll be winding down our standalone product next month, we’re excited for our team of 20 to continue onwards within the Communities, Direct Messages, and Creators initiatives at Twitter.

Emphasis mine.

[Rat_au_van (Em)]

@N26throwaway

Would be a shame, but also wouldn’t surprise me

It looks like they’re incorporating them into existing teams so I doubt they’ll drop them

[Peter_G]

@N26throwaway

It suggests Twitter acquired the talent, rather than the product. I’ve become a pretty big fan of the product.

My reading is that Twitter has acquired the whole company - the app, the IP, the staff and everything else.

I imagine there will be a period of pause whilst they really work out what they’re going to do with it - but it seems clear that it’ll be rolling Sphere-like features into Twitter rather than keeping the app on.