Twitter Inc., says it has acquired Dublin-based start-up, OpenBack, with confirmation by the push notification company stating, “OpenBack is joining Twitter and will be shutting down on April 19, 2022.” The announcement was made by Twitter’s Head of Consumer Product, Jay Sullivan, who claims that millions of people visit Twitter via notifications every day. This is just six months after the company acquired Sphere, a group chat app founded in 2016 that aims to make conversations more interactive and organised.
With this acquisition, OpenBack and its talented team will help Twitter improve its ability to deliver the right notifications at the right time, in a way that puts users’ privacy first. Sullivan says he’s thrilled to have them join the flock and looks forward to seeing their impact.
OpenBack is the only Mobile Engagement Platform that uses Device-Side Decisions and Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Its system determines the optimal timing to provide push notifications to each user based on a variety of on-device signals and machine learning methods. “Unlike traditional mobile engagement and push notification vendors & providers, this unique solution uses a hybrid of remote and local notifications to give more control and solve reliability,
delivering highly personalized feature-rich notifications that have impact. Works alongside any existing push notifications.”
Instead of getting push notifications from the cloud, OpenBack says that the app on each user’s device ‘controls, updates, and tracks’ when push notifications and in-app messages are delivered at the right time, rather than just getting push notifications from the cloud. This reduces the dependency on iOS and Android systems for notification delivery, perhaps mitigating the impact of Apple’s privacy-preserving ATT update.
Twitter’s latest speed update shows that the platform hasn’t been as affected by Apple’s ATT change as other apps, but it’s still striving to mitigate any effects. While switching to on-device notifications won’t prohibit consumers from disabling data tracking when prompted, it will allow Twitter to better personalise its notifications, even if it is off.
Discovery continues to be a source of contention for Twitter, with the social networking site spending years improving the discovery process for new users, while new features such as Spaces continue to face exposure issues.
If Twitter can emphasize the greatest tweet content at the right time and engage more people in real-time discussion within the app, this might be a significant step toward increasing usage and user engagement and establishing Twitter as a more indispensable utility. Tweets could know, for example, when you’re more likely to interact, or which alerts you’re more likely to tap through when notified. This is what OpenBack will help the company achieve.
The OpenBack team will join Twitter and immediately begin work on improving the app’s notification system.
