Twitter will disable Fleets, it’s ephemeral tweets feature, from August 3, the company announced.
Launched last year and similar to the ‘Stories’ feature on platforms such as Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, Fleets lets users create posts that disappear after 24 hours and have no retweets, likes or public comments. Currently, they appear at the top of the user’s timeline.
The microblogging platform, in a blog post, explained that not enough new users were leveraging Fleets, unlike what it had hoped.
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“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,” it said.
“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,” it added.
The platform said that the feature was used by those tweeting the most. It will use the learnings to create other ways for people to join the conversation.
A majority of the fleets posted were from the media. The platform will soon test updates to the Tweet composer and camera to incorporate features from the Fleets composer such as the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers.
It also noticed that the top of the timeline continues to be a good spot to highlight what’s happening right now. Users will now see Spaces at the top of their timeline when someone they follow is hosting or speaking in a live audio conversation, as they do currently.
Furthermore, Twitter had previously conducted a Fleets ads test, which concluded last month. This was one of its first explorations of full-screen, vertical ads.
“We’re taking a close look at learnings to assess how these ads perform on Twitter,” it said.