Twitter Acquires Yes Inc., Makes Former Googler VP of Product

Twitter has acquired Yes Inc., a Palo Alto-based startup that has been developing social apps like Frenzy and WYD. Yes CEO Keith Coleman will become Twitter’s new VP of Product. Twitter CTO Adam Messinger announced the acquisition and appointment on Twitter Thursday.

Before founding Yes in 2014, Coleman worked for a decade at Google where he led the development of products like Gmail, Inbox and Google Chat.

Yes is in many ways an interesting addition to Twitter: The startup has been rapidly developing apps around social sharing, and in turn experimented with real-life event planning (Frenzy) and Snapchat-like photo sharing (WYD). Other apps developed by the startup included a messenger dubbed Heyo! and an app that helped parents coordinate play dates for their little ones.

The pace of development at Yes could be a welcome change for Twitter, which has long been criticized by for taking too long to ship product changes. The yes team could potentially also help Twitter with taking cues from other social apps, much in the same way that Instagram has been adding new features that are inspired by Snapchat.

However, don’t expect Twitter to put its muscle behind any of Yes’ existing apps. While Twitter has acquired and then build out apps like periscope and Vine in the past, it has no such plans for this acquisition. “In the coming weeks, we’ll be shutting down our apps so that we can focus entirely on our new efforts,” the Yes team wrote on its website Thursday.

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