Twitter To Kill Fleets Feature, Its Competitor To Facebook Stories

Fleets, the row of fullscreen tweets at the top of the Twitter timeline that expires after 24 hours is shutting down due to low usage after launching widely just eight months ago.

Twitter on Wednesday announced it will discontinue its Fleets feature on Aug. 3.

Fleets was rolled out to compete with the stories features available in Snapchat and Instagram. The decision to shut the feature down comes after the company announced in June it was beginning to test ads inside Fleets, a move that would have helped it monetize the posts.

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.

“We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” the company said in a blog post. “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.”

Twitter introduced Fleets in November 2020. The feature allows Twitter users post full-screen photos, videos, reactions to tweets or plain text that disappears after 24 hours.

The purpose of Fleets was to get more users to post content on Twitter, but rather than encouraging new users to post content, Fleets were just used by Twitter’s existing power users, the company said.

“Fleets are mostly used by people who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others,” the company said. “We’ll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter.”