Twitter Shuts Down Fleets

Remember when Snapchat created the Stories format and then every company under the sun copied it? Well, as it turns out, some were more successful than others at that. Facebook’s Instagram, for example, overtook Snapchat a long time ago and it’s not looking back. Twitter, on the other hand? It just announced that it’s killing Fleets which it rolled out to everyone in November.

What do you mean you don’t know what Fleets are? They’re Twitter’s Stories. Or, rather, were. Not anymore. In an interesting twist, it turns out that some social networks may be more fitting for the Stories format than others, and Twitter ain’t it, as they say. The reason why the ephemeral tweet format is shutting down is due to low usage after launching widely just eight months ago.

Starting on August 3rd, users will instead just see active Spaces — Twitter’s live audio chat rooms — at the top of their timelines. And the composer for traditional tweets will be updated with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text-formatting and GIF stickers over photos.

Twitter’s decision to axe Fleets is not just an admission that the feature didn’t work, but that the company still hasn’t figured out how to get people tweeting more. For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly and not just consume other people’s tweets. Fleets was its shot at using Stories, the popular social media format invented by Snapchat and further popularized by Instagram, to lower the pressure around tweeting.

Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product, said in a statement: “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.”

Killing the feature now is especially sudden since Twitter just rolled it out to everyone in November and started testing ads between fleets last month. At the time, the company called the ads an “experiment” with a handful of advertisers. It’s unclear if those fullscreen ads will show up in other parts of the app in the future.

Brown said: “If we’re not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while – we’re not taking big enough chances. We’ll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter.”