It seems weird, but companies often purchase other smaller companies to help boost one aspect of their product. In Twitter’s case, it wants to give people the right notifications at the right time. Other than that, the company didn’t provide any more information about this acquisition. Twitter’s head of consumer product tweeted about the venture, but didn’t mention anything about what will actually change; we’ll just have to wait.
What is this company, and how will it help make Twitter notifications more relevant?
OpenBack is an application that handles computations on the actual device rather than on an online server. This is what Twitter said, but it didn’t really dig into much detail. The thinking behind this purchase is to help deliver the right notifications at the right time. People hate getting irrelevant notifications from social media platforms. This is something that Twitter wants to solve. How OpenBack’s technology will help this is still a mystery. Twitter delivers notifications to you through the internet, but before it actually alerts you, it might actually go through OpeBack’s technology first. That’s just speculation, of course. OpenBack could act as an on-device filter to hold and deliver the notifications until the right times based on how much you use the app. The companies didn’t disclose how much Twitter paid for OpenBack or any other conditions of the acquisition. We expect it to be in the millions or tens of millions of dollars. That seems suitable for a rather obscure app. As time goes on, we should, hopefully, get more information about what exactly will change with this new business deal.
