Twitter Fleets to be discontinued in August

Twitter has had to admit that Fleets have not been able to attract more users to the social media platform and has now announced that it will discontinue the feature August onwards. Twitter has had to take the step just when such products appear to do well on other platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Ilya Brown, Twitter's Head of Product, Brand & Video Ads, made the announcement on Twitter Blog on Wednesday (July 11)

"We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts," Brown says at the very start of his blog post. However, he says that Fleets have not been able to increase the number of people joining the conversation.

"...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...," says Brown.

It is because of this, he says, Twitter will be discontinuing the Fleets feature from August 3.

Similar features are doing well on rival platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Snapchat was a pioneer of this feature as it launched disappearing messages in 2013. Since then many platforms like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc have launched their own versions.