Twitter has on Wednesday, July 14 announced that it will be shutting down Fleets – its own vanishing post feature it launched into general availability in eight months ago – on August 3.
It would be recalled that the microblogging platform launched Fleets in November and released it for public use in March after testing the product in a handful of markets.
The feature, which appeared prominently at the top of the app, let people share posts that disappeared after 24 hours, a format invented by Snapchat and later copied and further popularized by Facebook’s stable of apps, including Instagram.
However, the tech giant via Twitter Support account announced the new development, saying that in its place, users will instead only see active Spaces — Twitter’s live audio chat rooms — at the top of their timelines.
We had big hopes for Fleets, but now it’s time to say goodbye and take flight with other ideas. Starting August 3, Fleets will no longer be available.
More on what we learned and what’s coming 👇 (1/4)— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) July 14, 2021
The company said the reason for the move is due to low usage, specifically among the more hesitant Twitter users who it said it was trying to target in the first place.
Read Also: Twitter Launches Clubhouse-Like Voice-Chat Rooms Called ‘Spaces’
Speaking more about the company’s decision in a blog post on Wednesday, Ilya Brown, VP of product at Twitter said;
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.
The shutdown of Fleets is a standard part of Twitter’s product development cycle, according to Brown.
He wrote;
If we’re not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while — we’re not taking big enough chances.
We’re evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation. A number of these updates, like Fleets, are speculative and won’t work out. We’ll be rigorous, evaluate what works, and know when to move on and focus elsewhere. We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter.
The announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise, given that the most that has been reported about Fleets has been when Twitter launched them, or made some kind of product iteration on them, or found itself facing a technical glitch. Yet in terms of viral traction, or high profile Fleets, there hasn’t been much.
