Ali Hasan
Twitter has acquired social broadcasting app Breaker. The deal will see Breaker’s team joining Twitter to help them improve the health of the public conversation as well as work on Twitter’s new audio-based networking project, Twitter Spaces. The Breaker app, however, will shut down on January 15, 2021.
Here is the official announcement made by Breaker “Here at Breaker, we’re truly passionate about audio communication and we’re inspired by the ways Twitter is facilitating public conversations for people around the world,” wrote Breaker CEO Erik Berlin. “We’re impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit at Twitter and enthusiastic about the new experiences that the team is creating.”
Breaker was founded in 2016 and is led by the CEO Berlin himself. The app had launched at a time when podcasts were still very much thought of as audio feeds and podcast apps as productivity tools — not experiences around which a community could be built.
Breaker helped to change that perception by offering an app where users could like and comment on episodes, discover new podcasts by following friends, share favorite shows to social media and much more.
Twitter recently began letting a “very small” group of users create Spaces, which it described as online venues “built around the voices of the people using Twitter.
“As many as 10 people can be invited to speak in a Twitter Space, and there is no limit on the number of people who can just listen, according to a blog post about the project. This is your space to share thoughts, send emojis, and more” Twitter said in the post. “We will expand the list of people who can create Spaces over time.”
The real winner in the Breaker deal is Twitter, as it gains key talent as it enters what is shaping up to be a buzzy new market in 2021 for voice-based social networking — an idea whose time has come, perhaps, thanks to people being stuck at home amid a pandemic. Without conferences and parties to attend, many went in search of better ways to connect online.
But it remains to be seen if Twitter — a service that has publicly struggled with online toxicity and moderation failures — will be able to make audio networking a safe place for users to chat, or if it will amplify Twitter’s existing challenges in these areas. It also remains to be seen if voice-based networking will have a future in a reopened, post-COVID world where we can once again meet others in real-world, public places, instead of Twitter Spaces.
As of now, we don’t know the amount paid to Breaker for acquisition.
