Twitter acquires smart Android lockscreen Cover

Steven Loeb · April 7, 2014 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/3627

Cover, which recommends apps to users based on their environment, will remain available for now

(Updated to reflect comment from Twitter)

Facebook Home, the company's attempt to create a quasi-"Facebook phone" by taking over the Android coverscreen, premiered almostr exactly one year ago. And it was one of Facebooks biggest failures.

Turns out, people do not want their phone to revolve around their social media accounts. So why is Twitter now looking like it could, potentially, be wading into similarly harsh waters with its latest acquisition?

Twitter has decided to purchase Cover, an Android lockscreen that suggests apps to the user that they are most likely to want to access based on their surrounding environment. The acquisition was announced via  a blog post from Cover co-founders Gordon Luk, Todd Jackson and Edward Ho on Monday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

"Since launching Cover in October, we’ve had the privilege of reaching hundreds of thousands of people. We’ve improved Cover with their help and feedback, and demonstrated how Android can help make people’s lives easier," they wrote.

"It’s been an incredible journey, a journey that we’re excited to announce is taking a turn today as we bring the Cover team to Twitter to take these ideas even further."

What exactly this all means for Cover is not entirely clear. The co-founders say that Cover will remain in the Google Play store "for now," and they promise to update users "if that changes down the road." Honestly, that takes it sound like Cover is not exactly long for this world in its present form. 

As for what else the team would be working on at Twitter, Luk, Jackson and Ho were pretty cagey about that as well.

"Twitter, like Cover, believes in the incredible potential of Android. They share our vision that smartphones can be a lot smarter — more useful and more contextual — and together we’re going to make that happen," they wrote.

"We’ll be building upon a lot of what makes Cover great, and we’re thrilled to create something even better at Twitter."

Cover raised $1.7 million in seed funding from investors that included First Round Capital and Max Levchin.

Whatever Twitter is planning to do with the Cover team, I hope that it does not try to create its own Home-like service, which essentially hijacked the user's phone and made it Facebook-centric. 

The app flopped, and vventually Facebook began incorporating the best, and most popular features, of Home, like Chat Heads, into its original app as Home faded into obscurity. 

It is more likely that Twitter is simply looking to solidify its mobile presence. That is, after all, where the majority of its money comes from. 

In the first quarter of 2014, Twitter posted revenue of $243 million, of which advertising accounted for $220 million. More importantly, over 75% of Twitter's ad revenue was from mobile. Mobile also represented 184 million, or 76%, of the company's 241 million total mothly active users (MAUs).

A Twitter spokesperson had nothing to share beyond the Cover blog post. 

(Image source: blog.coverscreen.com)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.