An Insider
Twitter is ending its fleet feature nine months after introducing it to everyone, saying it did not accomplish what the company hoped. It was a move that would have helped it monetize its posts. The platform owners are of the view that they hoped the fleets would help many people get comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. Moreover, the company said in its blog that we had not seen the number of people increasing joining this fleet conversation as we hoped. Twitter introduced its fleet’s stories in November 2020, which is not a pretty long time from now. This feature lets Twitter users post full-screen videos, photos, and reactions to tweets, and they disappear in about 24 hours. The purpose of introducing this feature was to get more users to post content on Twitter. Sadly, users showed less interest in the fleet’s features; fleets were just used by primary people already using Twitter.
Disappearing stories have been a popular product for other social media company mainly Snapchat and Facebook where most posts are photos or videos while Twitter is influenced by text. Twitter said it is looking towards building more features that would encourage people’s pictures and videos more often. As this feature did not drive any revenue, fleets will be shut down on August 3rd. Twitter’s head of product mentioned fleet’s was built to be a lower pressure quick way for the people to share their thoughts especially for new users to this platform. Head of product Brown said that Twitter would manage tests to try incorporating features from the fleet, including the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers into twitter’s product.
The keynote
As of now, fleets don’t seem to have a good fate like Moments and Periscope yet. Ilya Brown says,’ Using the learning and experiences from fleets, the platform will find more ways to address what holds people back from participating in Twitter.’ Both Brown and Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour pointed out that winding down features every once in a while is something that a company foresees as it tries to reinvent or improve itself.
