Twitter Sinks Fleets, The Ephemeral Tweets Feature

Twitter TWTR announced it's discontinuing Fleets, a short-lived feature designed to allow tweets to disappear after 24 hours online.

What Happened: The social media platform introduced Fleets last November, and many observers noticed its similarity to Snap's SNAP Snapchat and the "Stories" feature on Facebook FB, which provides ephemeral postings not designed to be long-lasting part of one's timeline.

In a corporate blog post, Ilya Brown, Twitter's head of product, brand and video ads, stated Fleets was designed to "help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation" on the platform, but the feature did not receive the level of use that the company wanted and, thus will be discontinued on Aug. 3.

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What's Next: Brown added that Twitter is learning from this experience and will focus on other ways to "address some of the anxieties that hold people back from tweeting" while incorporating elements of the Fleets concept into on-site advertising and messaging presentations.

"We're evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation," Brown said, adding that if Twitter is not taking "big enough chances" if it's not "evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while."