Only eight months after its debut, Twitter has announced that its “Fleets” feature would be removed from the app.
Fleets debuted in November 2020 as a competitor to Instagram Stories and Snapchat, which let users publish content to their profile that disappears after 24 hours.
Ilya Brown, Twitter’s head of product, brand, and video advertisements, characterized Fleets as “a lower-pressure, ephemeral method for individuals to express their transitory ideas” in a blog post on the company’s website.
He did note, though, that Twitter was removing the function because they “haven’t seen an increase in the number of new individuals entering the conversation with Fleets as we intended.”
Yesterday, the firm made the following news on their official Twitter account:
We hoped Fleets would encourage more people to join the conversation, but that wasn’t the case. So we’re removing them and focusing on improving other parts of Twitter.
– Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 14, 2021
The company added:
we’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff
we’re sorry or you’re welcome
– Twitter (@Twitter) July 14, 2021
Twitter users have until August 3rd to make the most of Fleets.
Instead of rows of, generally one or two, Fleets, users on the services will see active Spaces — Twitter’s live audio conversation rooms – at the top of their timeline starting on August 3. Fleets’ camera editing tools, including text formatting and GIF stickers over images, will be integrated into the composer for conventional tweets.
