Microblogging giant Twitter is shutting down Fleets, its take on Instagram and Snapchat’s Stories feature. The feature saw a limited launch just over a year ago, and mass rollout started only about eight months ago. Fleets would last on the platform for 24 hours and be deleted automatically.
“We’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff. We’re sorry or you’re welcome,” the platform tweeted through its official account.
According to Twitter, Fleets wasn’t getting enough usage on the platform. “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,” Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product, said in a statement to The Verge.
This isn’t particularly surprising, given how many users had criticized the feature, saying that a Stories like format didn’t belong on Twitter. Alternatively, Twitter has also launched a host of new features over the past year or so, including Spaces, which also appears on the top of the user’s Twitter feed. Shutting down Fleets will give Twitter more space on the app to showcase Spaces, and allow the company to capitalize on the booming audio-only social media space.
Twitter has also been announcing monetization tools, which would allow users to make money from their tweets by providing special content, ticketed Spaces and more. Fleets perhaps didn’t fit in any of the company’s future plans. Other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have been able to monetize Stories by incorporating ads into them, but Twitter won’t be able to do the same unless the feature was actually being used by users.
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