The so-called fleets, which disappear after 24 hours, have not brought the success Twitter hoped for.
Twitter has declared its experiment with self-disappearing tweets to have failed. The fleets, which were only introduced worldwide last November, did not encourage more users to post more on the service, as hoped, Twitter said in a blog entry on Wednesday. The function will therefore be discontinued on August 3rd.
At the same time, the fleets do not disappear completely without a trace: The camera of the official Twitter app is to be improved with elements initially developed for this purpose.
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Fleets as stories
The word Fleets stands for “fleeting tweets”. They are automatically deleted after 24 hours. You can only reply to this as a direct message, but not in the public timeline. It was hoped that this would also make reluctant users dare to share content on Twitter, it said.
The function was also Twitter’s answer to the trend towards the Stories functions, which are popular with many users. The idea of making selected photos and videos available to friends for a period of 24 hours was initially implemented by the Snapchat photo app. It was then copied from Facebook to apps such as WhatsApp, among others.
