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Say goodbye to fleets, the row of fullscreen tweets at the top of the Twitter timeline that expire after 24 hours. The ephemeral tweet format is on the way out due to low usage after being widely launched just eight months ago.
Starting August 3, users will instead see Active Spaces – Twitter’s live audio chat rooms – at the top of their timeline. And the Composer for Traditional Tweets will be updated with more camera editing features from Fleets, like text formatting and GIF stickers on photos.
Twitter’s decision to take down Fleets isn’t just an admission that the feature didn’t work, but that the company still hasn’t figured out how to get people to tweet more. For years, Twitter has struggled to get new users to post regularly and not just consume other people’s tweets. Fleets aimed to use Stories, the popular social media format invented by Snapchat and popularized by Instagram, to reduce the pressure around tweets.
“We were hoping Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” said Ilya Brown, vice president of products at Twitter, in a statement. “But since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we haven’t seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets as we had hoped. “
The removal of the feature now is particularly sudden as Twitter just rolled it out to everyone in November and started testing ads between fleets last month. At the time, the company called the ads an “experiment” with a handful of advertisers. It is not known if these full screen ads will appear in other parts of the app in the future.
“If we don’t evolve our approach and reduce functionality every now and then, we’re not taking enough risk,” Brown said. “We will continue to create new ways to participate in conversations, listen to comments and change direction when there can be a better way to serve people using Twitter. “
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