Twitter is bidding farewell to a recently-introduced feature it was quite excited about. Fleets, the fullscreen ephemeral tweets at the top of Twitter timeline, meets its fleeting end after just eight months since it was launched. Due to the low usage of the feature, users will no longer be able to use Fleets from August 3.
Twitter said in a blog post on Wednesday that it had hoped to make people feel more comfortable about joining conversations on the platform with the help of Fleets. But the statistics showed that Fleets was used mostly by those who were tweeting the most, defeating its intended purpose.
Twitter users will just see active Spaces, Twitter's alternative to Clubhouse which hosts audio chat rooms, at the top of their timelines. The decision to kill Fleets was rather sudden since it was just rolled out to everyone in November. Even more so, Twitter was even trying to monetise using Fleets by testing ads last month. But it looks like Twitter has hit another dead-end in its attempts to get people to engage more, tweet more, converse more on the platform.
Lessons learned from failure of Fleets
Twitter isn't giving up. Even the failure of Fleets came with lessons, which it hopes to use in order to grow. Twitter now aims to explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating more in conversations. Since users were sharing media, photos and videos, in Fleets, Twitter will incorporate features like full-screen camera, text formatting options and GIF stickers into tweet composer. Finally, Twitter wants to assess how ads perform on Twitter after exploring full-screen, vertical format ads using Fleets.
"If we're not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while – we're not taking big enough chances. 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," Ilya Brown, Twitter's vice president of product, said in a statement.
