According to the latest news, Twitter is going to remove its Fleets feature. It is being shut down due to low usage. The feature has been active for just around 8 months. From 3rd August onwards users will just see active Spaces — Twitter’s live audio chat rooms at the top of their timeline.
Twitter also said it will upgrade traditional tweets with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text-formatting, and GIF stickers over photos. As users, we should consider Twitter’s decision to remove Fleets is admitting that the feature was not much popular. In simple words, with the feature, the company was unable to make people tweet more often.
For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly. Over the years, new users have simply followed celebrities and others people’s tweets. Fleets was a feature like Snapchat which was 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.”
Twitter released the feature only in November last year and eventually, the company started testing ads on the feature only from last month so killing the feature seems to be a sudden decision. Last month, while trying ads on the feature, Twitter called it an “experiment”. It was true that ad testing was tried only with a handful of advertisers. It is unclear if those full screen 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.”
