Twitter kills Fleets within a year of its public rollout

In less than a year, Twitter has bid adieu to its version of stories called Fleets. Inspired by the success of Stories on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, Twitter’s Fleets were also ephemeral and remaining true to its nature they’ll disappear on August 3.

In an official blog post, the company stated that Fleets failed to gain traction and could not inspire more users to join the platform or share their fleeting thoughts.

Though, the company claims that Fleets gave them some important insights and learnings which will be used to improve Twitter as a platform. Once Fleets is gone, users will see Twitter’s Clubhouse-clone active Spaces, on the top of their timelines on the mobile apps.

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Twitter’s VP of Product, Illya Brown says, “we built Fleets to address some of the anxieties that hold people back from Tweeting, Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their Tweets and talk directly with others.” Accepting that the product didn’t live up to the expectations, he states, “We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we’re focused on making this better for you.”

Now the micro-blogging platform plans to add Fleet’s feature to the Tweet composer to improve the regular tweeting experience. The features that will be implemented include - full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers among others.

Twitter had recently announced that it will monetize Fleets with full-screen text and video ads, however, due to low usage the company wasn’t successful in generating revenue. Though it is not sure if the advertisements will continue to appear at other places on the social media platform.

Twitter has, of late been, testing various new features like an array of emojis so that users can express themselves better, Twitter Blue and since the Spaces got decent traction, it introduced ways for content creators to generate some additional revenue using Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces.

Promising to evolve as a platform, Brown said, “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.”

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