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Twitter to remove Fleets less than a year after its launch

Twitter Fleets will be taken down eight months after its launch as the product failed to gain traction with its users.

Noreen Shazreen

Probably the coolest cat lady you’ll ever meet.

Published: 15 July 2021, 11:58 AM

It’s time to say goodbye to Fleets, the rows of full-screen tweets at the top of Twitter’s timeline, much like Instagram Stories and Snapchat.

On Wednesday (Jul 14), Twitter announced that it will be removing its Fleets feature on Aug 3 due to low usage among its users.

Launched in November last year, the Stories-like feature was implemented to reduce the pressure around tweeting by allowing users to express their thoughts and opinions more casually.

“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,” Ilya Brown, Twitter’s vice president of product, said in a statement.

Following Fleets’ demise on Aug 3, users will instead see active Spaces – Twitter’s live voice chat rooms – at the top of their timelines.

While Fleets will no longer be available, some of its creation features – like the full-screen camera, text formatting options and GIF stickers – will be implemented into the standard Tweets composer.

The app has stated that its Fleeds ads test, which ended last month, was an experiment with a handful of advertisers to determine how these ads would perform on Twitter.

There is no word on whether those full-screen ads will be featured in other parts of the app in the future.