Editor's take: Twitter has agreed to purchase software startup Quill, makers of the business communication app by the same name. It's unclear how long it'll take before we start seeing Quill's influence show up in Twitter, but for now, we have to imagine the Slacks and Microsoft Teams of the world are quite happy with this news as it eliminates a direct competitor from the ranks.

Quill launched back in February for most major platforms as an alternative to Slack, the enterprise communication and collaboration app Salesforce acquired in December 2020 for $27.7 billion. In short, Quill's creators felt existing platforms were overwhelming and disorganized, leading to lots of wasted time. "Quill is messaging for people that focus," it said on its site.

In its farewell message, the Quill team said that together with Twitter, they will continue to pursue their original goal of making online communication more thoughtful and more effective. Financial terms of the purchase were not revealed.

The service is shutting down as a result of the acquisition, and it's all happening rather quickly. Quill users will have until December 11 at 1 pm Pacific to export team messaging history. At that time, the servers will be powered down and all data will be deleted.

Active teams will receive a full refund, we're told.

Nick Caldwell, general manager of core tech at Twitter, said they're bringing the team's experience and creativity to Twitter to make tools like DMs a more useful and expressive way for folks to communicate on the platform.