Last night, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that the social media platform will officially axe its ‘Fleets’ feature following slow user adoption. We don’t blame ‘em, considering it was just another rip-off of Snapchat’s disappearing Story feature.
While the same feature became wildly popular shortly after launching on Instagram (we’re still not convinced about the feature on Facebook). But it seems Twitter users didn’t take to the vertical-graphic format that disappears after 24 hours as well as Insta users did.
A Fleeting moment
Fleets made their debut on the platform in 2017, packaged as ‘a 24-hour disappearing tweet feature’. It officially rolled out to the public just eight months ago, and now they’re about to do another disappearing act — but this time it’s permanent.
According to a blog post by Ilya Brown, Twitter’s head of product, brand & video ads (wonder if that fits on a standard business card), Fleets will be officially killed off on 3 August. Unfortunately, the platform didn’t see its users adopt the feature as expected, saying, “… 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 post details that Twitter is continuously working on other features, and just because one doesn’t work, the devs definitely learnt something from the experience. Sounds like the plot to The Social Network 2 if we ever heard one.
Source: Twitter blog via Apple Insider