Twitter to Retire Fleets. Its competitor to Facebook and Instagram Stories

Keynotes

Twitter on Wednesday announced they are discontinuing the fleets feature
The announcement means the company will shut down its feature designed to compete against Facebook and Instagram
Fleets will be discontinued on August 3

The social media platform on Wednesday announced that it’s ending the ‘Fleets’ feature. Where we could share photos, text, and videos that disappeared after 24 hours. Similar to Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat stories.

The feature was introduced in November 2020 and will be discontinued on August 3.

Ilya Brown, Twitter’s head of product said fleets was designed as a low-pressure medium for new users to share content.

But fleets failed to do that. It was used by users who already had a good engagement on Twitter to amplify their own tweets or talk directly with others. While the goal was to engage new users who don’t like to tweet regularly or aren’t concerned about likes and retweets.

Twitter is currently testing and adding many new features to its basket. It recently added Spaces, an audio chat platform in response to chat hit Clubhouse; Tip Jar that allows users to send money directly to their favorite accounts.

Twitter is trying to incorporate some features from fleets into regular twitter products. Features like the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers.

“We saw that our big bet didn’t pan out the way we expected and discontinued the feature,” said Beykpour, the consumer product head of Twitter. “We’re still determined to make Twitter conversations more interactive for our users, and these bets will pivot us in the right direction.”

“And just to make a point of our internal philosophy clear: big bets are risky, so by definition, several of them won’t work,” Beykpour added. “If we’re not having to wind down features every once in a while, then it would be a sign that we’re not taking big enough swings.”

Conclusion

The competition between social media platforms motivates them to innovate and test different features. Fleet’s failure to make an impression could be a blow to Twitter’s ambition of doubling its active users by the year 2023. A key to hitting those goals is to keep testing new features that would encourage user growth and engagement.