Twitter Inc said Tuesday that it acquired Slack's competitor, Quill, to help the social networking company improve its messaging tools.

The acquisition comes as Twitter recently appointed a new chief executive, Parag Agrawal, to replace co-founder Jack Dorsey, who stepped down from the top role last week. Agrawal, who served as chief technology officer, is expected to focus more on engineering to the company.

Slack, owned by Salesforce, has become a popular online messaging tool for the workplace used by many companies. Quill emerged as a potential competitor for the messaging app this year.

Quill's team will help Twitter improve its direct messaging tool and make it "a more useful and expressive way people to have conversations on the service, " said Nick Caldwell, Twitter's general manager for core technology, in a tweet on Tuesday.

Quill said in a blog post that its service will shut down as the team integrates into Twitter.

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