Twitter is shutting down Fleets

In less than a year from its launch date, Fleets or ephemeral Tweets is being wound down by Twitter as it has failed to take off as a product and the platform has not seen an increase in new users using it.

The Twitter version of Stories, Fleets will no longer be available on the app from August 3. India was among the first three countries to test Fleets, a way for people to share their ideas and momentary thoughts. These posts would disappear after 24 hours and had no Retweets, likes, or public comments.

Twitter described it as "a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts", and it turns out the platform discovered that Fleets was only being used the most by people who are already Tweeting the most, to amplify their own Tweets.

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The top of the timeline where Fleets would rest is one of the prime spots of a Timeline, and with Fleets being brought down, Twitter will now replace that with Spaces, the new offering by the microblogging platform used to host live audio conversations.

The Fleet ads test has concluded as planned, and the full-screen vertical format as an ad format would continue to be explored, as it was one of the vertical full-screen expeditions. The learnings from this format would be assessed to understand the performance of such ad formats.

Twitter will also use learnings from Fleets to understand why people did or did not engage with this product and use them as insights to develop products further in the future.

Media has been a strong factor in the use of Fleets, Twitter will be incorporating some features from Fleets such as a full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers, in the Tweet Composer. This incorporation will first experiment within the testing phase.