INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The company has picked up the team behind Lightwell, a startup that had built a set of developer tools to build interactive, narrative apps,
initiative, with the rest of her small four-person team joining her on the conversations project.(Sidenote: Sara Haider, who had been
prototyping app, announced that she would be moving on to a new project at the company after a short break
I understand twttr will continue to be used to openly test conversation tweaks and other potential changes to how the app works
Interestingly, Twitter is on a product hiring push it seems
Other recent hires Coleman noted were Other recent product hires include Angela Wise and Tom Hauburger
Coincidentally, both joined from autonomous companies, respectively Waymo and Voyage.To be clear, this is more acqui-hire than hire: only
the Lightwell team (of what looks like three people) is joining Twitter
The Lightwell product will no longer be developed, but it is not going away, either
Xie noted in a separate Medium post that apps that have already been built (or plan to be built) on the platform will continue to work
It will also now be free to use.Lightwell originally started life in 2012 as Hullabalu, as one of the many companies producing
stories stood out not just because of the distinctive cast of characters that the startup had created, but for how the narratives were
presented: part book, part interactive game, the stories engaged children and moved narratives along by getting the users to touch and drag
elements across the screen.After some years, Hullabalu saw an opportunity to package its technology and make it available as a platform for
It seems the company shifted at that time to make Lightwell its main focus.The Hullabalu apps remained live on the App Store, even when the
company moved on to focus on Lightwell
Xie says they will remain as is.In its startup life, the company went through YCombinator, TechStars, and picked up some $6.5 million in
funding (per Crunchbase), from investors that included Joanne Wilson, SV Angel, Vayner, Spark Labs, Great Oak, Scout Ventures and more.If
turning Hullabalu into Lightwell was a pivot, then the exit to Twitter can be considered yet another interesting shift in how talent and
rivers of chatter that flow in one single feed, while conversations by their nature linger around a specific topic and become hard to follow
when there are too many people talking
Trying to build a way to fit the two concepts together has foxed the company for a long time now.At its best, bringing in a new team from
the outside will potentially give Twitter a fresh perspective on how to approach conversations on the platform, and the fact that Lightwell
has been thinking about creative ways to present narratives gives them some cred as a group that might come up completely new concepts for
