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Quill users advised to export chat history before servers turned off for Twitter buyout

Yet another Slack rival goes offline, but text-adventure fans need not panic

Twitter has acquired another dotcom – this time business-oriented, low-distraction text/audio/video chat service Quill.chat. Neither company said how much cash changed hands.

Quill.chat – no, not that Quill – only stuck its head above the parapet in April 2020 and launched on 23 February this year, so it may not be missed by all that many.

If you did use it and have anything you want to keep, you'd better be fast to grab your history – Quill said yesterday that customers only have two days to export their data. At 1pm on Saturday 11 December, it's shutting down its servers and deleting everything. All part of the fun of PaaS and cloud computing.

To be honest, we are are losing count, but the deal looks to be Twitter's 66th acquisition so far and the fifth of 2021. As of October, Twitter had spent about £750m buying other companies. It doesn't seem to have a lot to show for it; with the exception of Tweetdeck, most are never seen or heard of again.

Quill billed itself as a less distracting, more focused and structured alternative to Slack – which itself has dozens of would-be competitors. Notable FOSS ones include Rocket.chat, Mattermost, and Zulip.

Naturally, all the big software and social network vendors offer alternatives, too: Microsoft has Teams (don't mention Lync or Skype for Business), Facebook has Workplace, and Google has lots.

You could be forgiven for thinking that it would be easier for everyone if executives just learned to use plain text email and a judicious smattering of IRC. ®

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