It has been barely a month since Twitter acquired Squad, a video chat and screen-sharing app. The move saw the Squad team join Twitter's design, engineering, and product teams while the app itself shut down on December 12, the same day as the announcement.
Now, the social media platform has acquired yet another company in the form of Breaker whose iOS and Android apps put a social community spin on an otherwise traditional approach to podcasting apps. Its approach enabled podcast listeners to like and comment upon episodes, to foster and support community engagement, helped set Breaker apart from other podcast apps that functioned in a fashion similar to RSS readers.
In an announcement on the Breaker blog, Erik Berlin said:
"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. We’re impressed by the entrepreneurial spirit at Twitter and enthusiastic about the new experiences that the team is creating."
Unfortunately, for Breaker users, the company will be withdrawing its apps and services on Friday, January 15th, with the company encouraging users to migrate to other services based on if you are a listener using iOS or Android, or a content creator. Of course, people may wish to act sooner rather than later to ensure that they do not experience any interruptions to their podcasts by following Breaker's instructions to export their subscriptions to an OPML file.
Of course, it remains to be seen as to what exactly will manifest as a result of Twitter's latest acquisition. However, it may not want to wait too long while others, such as Spotify who intends to snap up podcast-hosting firm, Megaphone, forge ahead with building out their podcast ecosystems.
