It Is The End Of The Road For Twitter Fleets

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Twitter announced it will be shutting down Twitter Fleets, its own experiment with ephemeral content and the Stories format.

Just because you could, does not mean you should – and no, Stories are not for every platform.

Fleets may be only eight months old, they are already… well, fleeting. The ephemeral tweet format that expires after 24 hours has reached the end of the road at Twitter.

Twitter’s decision to kill Fleets came after the company realized not enough people used the format. As a format, Fleets was meant to help. more people join in on the conversation, but it did not even manage to do so, according to Ilya Brown, Twitter’s VP of product:

“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.”

Still, it comes as a surprise that Twitter decided to completely axe the feature, only eight months after it rolled out to everyone globally and just as the company had started testing ads between Fleets last month.

But perhaps the most likely reason could be in what comes next: Starting August 3rd, users will instead just see Spaces above the Twitter timeline. Spaces, Twitter’s live audio chat room feature, has been met with success and is likely to become the company’s focus over the next few months.