Twitter Says Goodbye to Fleets Within 8 Months of Its Launch

Fleets are ephemeral tweets that expire after 24 hours.

Fleets are disappearing tweets that sit in a row at the top of users' Twitter handles on smartphones

(Photo:IANS)

Microblogging platform Twitter has announced to shut down its ephemeral Fleets feature starting from 3 August. The microblogging platform had launched the feature only eight months ago.

Fleets are disappearing tweets that can be seen in a row at the top of users' Twitter handles on smartphones. It is similar to Instagram and Facebook story feature.

"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," Ilya Brown, Twitter's Vice President of product, said in a statement late on Wednesday, 14 July.

"We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Brown added.

Brown noted that Twitter did not see an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like it hoped. So therefore, the company decided that Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.

"Using what we’ve learned from Fleets, we will instead focus on creating other ways for people to participate in conversations, listening to feedback, and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter," Brown asserted.

Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, said that the initial ideal to roll out Fleets was not to build a storage product within Twitter, "but to solve the problem of people not wanting to tweet because they appear to be staying around too long".

"We certainly have seen a different audience than we normally see, but we still have much to learn and a lot to figure out in terms of, where it goes from here," he added.

(With inputs from IANS)