Just about 8 months after they launched for everyone, Twitter Fleets are already being laid to rest. The company plans to shut down Fleets early next month — citing low usage as the reason for its early demise.
For all intents and purposes, Fleets were an unabashed ripoff of Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories, and other similar features that have popped up on most social media sites over the past few years. Fleets allowed Twitter users to share a picture, video, or short bit of text with their followers. Unlike regular Tweets that live on forever, Fleets expired 24 hours after being posted. The idea behind Fleets was to allow people to share thoughts they didn’t deem worthy of a Tweet. As Twitter described last November, “That thing you didn’t Tweet but wanted to but didn’t but got so close but then were like nah. We have a place for that now — Fleets!”
Before Fleets could even reach its first birthday, Twitter is already calling it quits on the failed experiment. In a blog post titled, “Goodbye, Fleets,” Twitter says, “We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, 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. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.” The top section of the Twitter app will continue to show any ongoing Spaces, but from August 3 and onward, Fleets will no longer be present.
Why Twitter Fleets Was Doomed From The Start
It might come as a shock to some people that Twitter is removing a feature so quickly after launch, but in the grand scheme of things, the removal of Fleets isn’t surprising in the slightest. Fleets always felt like a tacked-on addition to Twitter rather than a core part of the app. There was a lot of buzz and excitement around it at launch, but in the days following Fleets’ release, just about every Twitter user can testify to their followers quickly ignoring the feature (if they ever used it in the first place). It’s not that the execution of Fleets was bad, but the idea of having a stories-like experience on Twitter never really clicked.
As Twitter points out towards the end of its blog post, the end of Fleets isn’t necessarily a huge blow for the company. “We’re evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation. A number of these updates, like Fleets, are speculative and won’t work out.” Twitter has proven to be especially aggressive in recent months with trialing new features on the platform — such as a Tip Jar feature for select users, the ability to charge monthly subscriptions with Super Follows, and Ticketed Spaces for charging an entry fee for exclusive chat/audio experiences. Fleets was one such experiment that didn’t quite land, and that’s OK.
Even with Fleets leaving, Twitter will still be holding on to some of its features. In addition to the top of the app continuing to show Spaces, Twitter notes that it’ll update the Tweet composer and camera with GIF stickers, new text format options, and a full-screen camera experience. Twitter also says it’s still trying to understand what prevents some users from getting more involved in conversations, suggesting additional experiments may be coming soon that also try to rethink how people use Twitter. Whether or not those future tests pan out remains to be seen, but at least in the case of Fleets, Twitter’s ready to move on.
