Twitter has just announced that they have acquired the engineering talent behind Fluther, which is a Q & A service run by a small team of engineers.
Unlike a few previous companies Twitter has assimilated however, the company has decided to keep the lights for the Fluther website.
Today, we’re adding four engineers and one designer through our acquisition of the team at Fluther, Inc. During our conversations with Fluther’s team, we were continually impressed by their technical talent, entrepreneurial spirit, and much of the thinking behind the question-and-answer product they’ve spent the last couple of years building.
When the Fluther team joins us they will focus on helping users discover the most relevant content on Twitter. Their product, Fluther.com, is not part of the acquisition and will remain separate from Twitter. (Official Twitter Blog)
Taking a cue from Facebook (who previously bought Friendfeed), Twitter will be allowing the service to continue, although the Fluther team has stated that users should not expect to see any more updates to the service in the future.
While Twitter’s social follow has been very useful in finding new people to follow, locating interesting tweets outside of Twitter trends has been underwhelming at best (at least for this author).
Helping users find more relevant content could help the service not only attract more users (especially in the US), but also help Twitter catch up to Facebook (who currently boasts over 500 million users).
