Twitter Acquires Local Discovery Startup Spindle, Will End Spindle Service

Twitter today acquired Spindle, an app that uses mobile devices and social networks to make a smarter localized search engine. The Spindle team will move to San Francisco and shutter the Spindle app.

Using social networks, the time of day, and your location, Spindle would show you places you may want to visit, like restaurants or stores or other points of interest.

“We’ve spent the past two-and-a-half years building a product that helps you answer the question: “What’s happening nearby right now?” Every time we’ve experimented and looked beyond local discovery, we’ve been amazed by the breadth and quality of content shared on Twitter,” the company wrote in a blog post today. “By joining forces with Twitter, we can do so much more to help you find interesting, timely and useful information about what’s happening around you.”

Spindle comes from ex-Microsoft engineers and raised $2.3 million in funding before being acquired by Twitter. The company introduced version 2.0 in March, which featured interesting Google Now-esque push notifications based on user preferences.

The Spindle team also said they will be relocating from Boston to San Francisco to join the Twitter team, and will be “sunsetting the Spindle service today to focus on these new and exciting opportunities.”

It’s not immediately clear what the Spindle team will be working on, but we obviously expect them to keep answering the question, “What’s happening nearby right now?” Combined with Twitter’s resources and social graph, the team could produce a product to rival Foursquare or Facebook’s local search.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. I reached out to Twitter for comment, who mostly pointed to Spindle’s blog post but also offered this tweet:

Welcome! “@spindle: Exciting news: Spindle has been acquired by @Twitter and joins the flock! http://t.co/zJdccsGKto”

— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) June 19, 2013