Skip to main content

Twitter hires the team behind news summary app Brief

Twitter hires the team behind news summary app Brief

/

Brief’s four staffers will join Twitter

Share this story

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

The Twitter bird logo in white against a dark background with outlined logos around it and red circles rippling out from it.
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Twitter will be bringing on the team building Brief, an app that summarizes news, the company announced Tuesday. The Brief team, which consists of four people, will work on projects that support features like Spaces and Explore, a Twitter spokesperson tells The Verge.

Twitter declined to share details on the terms of the deal, but the spokesperson said that Twitter isn’t buying the Brief business; this is more of an acquihire, as it’s only bringing in the team that worked on the app. The Brief app will be wound down on July 31st, and subscribers will see a notification starting Tuesday about the impending change.

The Brief acquihire continues Twitter’s recent trend of acquisitions and talent pickups for news features. The company bought Scroll, a subscription service that removes ads from news sites, in May, and said at the time the service would become “a meaningful addition to our subscriptions work.” That hasn’t materialized just yet, though; the Twitter Blue subscription product launched in June in Canada and Australia, and while it had a reader mode to help you more easily read threads, a Scroll-like feature isn’t part of the product right now. Twitter also bought newsletter service Revue in January.