The trend of stealing Snapchat’s most original idea continues on Twitter as the social media platform has revealed that it’s currently developing “ephemeral tweets” which is just a fancy way of describing tweets that last 24-hours before being cast into the fiery pits of deletion surrounding the Internet.
Have you ever looked at a tweet and thought, “Wow, that’s a really good tweet. I enjoyed the 3 seconds it took me to read that. I hope it vanishes after a day so I can move on with the beautiful memory of it without the burden of it’s existence weighing down on me.” We’ve all been down that path before, surely. Finally, Twitter has responded to our needs as it’s confirmed that “Fleets” are currently in development.
Fleets will appear at the very top of your news feed with mutual follower’s ephemeral thoughts appearing first on your timeline while people that are just followed by you will appear later on, which is essentially the layout of every Story-like feature across all competing platforms. As can be expected, these Fleets will be comprised of both text and images and will disappear after 24-hours.
The weird thing about Fleets is the lack of interactivity. The only thing you can really do with a person’s Fleet is to reply via a direct message; no retweets, likes or public replies can be used with Fleets. Which raises the question of, “What’s the point then?”
Yet the funniest part of this whole Fleets development is that the name isn’t exactly…original. Fleet is also the name of a certain brand of saline enema’s, something which Twitter is apparently already familiar with. Clearly that hasn’t stopped the development of the update though as Fleets will first be implemented in Brazil with plans to expand following feedback from users in the country. When might that be? Wish we could tell you, but we’re flushed out of ideas.
