Twitter has acquired Slack-like messaging app Quill with an eye toward improving messaging services, including direct messages, the company announced. A tweet thread announcing the deal, described Quill as a more deliberate way to communicate. “We’re bringing their experience and creativity to Twitter as we work to make messaging tools like DMs a more useful and expressive way people can have conversations on the service.” Quill will shut down, but its team will join Twitter’s team. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. A farewell blog post on Quill’s updates site provided instructions for users who want to export their team message histories. At that point, Quill will be turning off its servers and deleting all data. Active customers will be issued full refunds, the company said. “Together with Twitter, we will continue to pursue our original goal – to make online communication more thoughtful, and more effective, for everyone,” the blog post reads.

Instagram is set to introduce parental control features next year

Instagram will roll out new parental control features on its platform in March, the service’s head Adam Mosseri has announced in a blog post. They’ll allow parents and guardians to see how much time their teenagers spend on Instagram, set time limits, and get notified if their child reports someone. The controls were announced as a package of new features designed to make the platform a safer place, particularly for its teenage users. Although Mosseri’s post says these safety features have been in the works for “a long time,” their announcement comes in the wake of a series of damaging revelations about the Meta-owned social network. Alongside the new parental controls, Instagram says it’s developing an educational hub for parents and guardians to offer them tips and tutorials about children’s social media use. In the more immediate future, Instagram says it’s rolling out the “Take a Break” feature it started testing last month.

WhatsApp now lets you set all chats to disappear by default

WhatsApp is adding new functionality to its disappearing messages feature, which lets users set messages in a chat to automatically be deleted after a set period of time. WhatsApp says users will now have the option to turn on disappearing messages automatically for all their new one-on-one chats, so that all future messages will be automatically deleted from the service. The Meta-owned messaging service also says it’s giving users more options for how long before a message is deleted. When the feature first launched in November last year, users only had the option of having messages disappear after seven days. WhatsApp notes that turning on disappearing messages by default won’t affect existing chats. When you start a new one-on-one chat, a notice will appear to say that the disappearing messages feature is turned on, alongside a note that says it’s on by default. WhatsApp says the new features are available now across all platforms.