Just 8 months after it was introduced, Twitter Fleets will be no more, the company has announced that it will close its doors on the 3rd of August 2021.
Users around the world were excited with the new feature from Twitter called ‘Fleets’, an ephemeral look-alike of ‘Stories’ feature made popular by Instagram, WhatsApp, and Snapchat.
Twitter Fleets was designed to allow users to post pictures, short videos, and also share tweets that would disappear after a period of 24 hours. The company had hoped that this would encourage users to share their thoughts and keep the conversation going for at least a short period of time before disappearing and not be on the platform permanently.
“We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.” The company said in a blogpost.
All is not lost as the company will focus on other ways to keep the conversation going by creating and testing updates to the Tweet composer and incorporating features from the Fleets composer. Other things like Twitter Spaces will remain at the top of the timeline.
“Soon, we’ll test updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer – like the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers,” the company added.
Twitter also said that they will have a closer look at learnings to assess how these ads perform on Twitter since the Fleet ads test were concluded last month, as it was their first explorations of full-screen, vertical format ads.
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