In big news for Twitter users, the microblogging website has decided to discontinue the 'Fleets' feature, which was launched just eight months ago. The development comes after the company received a poor response on the feature.
Fleets are disappearing tweets that sit in a row at the top of users' Twitter handles on smartphones. These ephemeral tweets expire after 24 hours.
"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.
"We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Brown added.
From August 3, the Twitter users would only see active Spaces which are live audio chat rooms at the top of their timelines.
"We're removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff. we're sorry or you're welcome," Twitter posted on its own platform.
In a bid to take on Facebook and Snapchat, Twitter last month brought Stories-like vertical format, full-screen ads to its Fleets feature. Snapchat launched the Stories format feature in 2013, while Instagram introduced a feature on the same lines in 2016. Later, this feature also came to Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter brought this feature in late 2020 but it did not entice the users.
Twitter launched Fleets globally in November last year to give people a new, ephemeral way to join the conversation and share momentary thoughts.
People would Fleet text, reactions to Tweets, photos or videos and customize their Fleets with various backgrounds, stickers, and text options.
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the company started Fleets 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 like, where it goes from here," he had said.
(With IANS inputs)
