Twitter Fleets, the company’s take on the 24-hour long disappearing Stories format adapted by Facebook-owned properties and started by Snapchat, will be shut down on August 3.

Twitter introduced Fleets globally in November 2020 but hasn’t seen as much engagement around the feature as they hoped for and, as a result, are taking it down early next month.

Much like Stories on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, Fleets appeared in a separate section at the top of the app, and these posts lasted for 24 hours before disappearing from the platform. People couldn’t retweet, like or publically reply to Fleets but could respond directly to the posters DMs.

The San Francisco-based social networking platform also introduced full-screen vertical format ads in between Fleets last month as they find new monetisations opportunities on the platform; however, that hasn’t gone to plan as well. The company says they’ll be shifting their focus on creating more products to enable people to have conversations on the platform.

Fleets are going away but its features might stay

While Twitter has confirmed that Fleets will be discontinued on August 3, some features like the full-screen camera, text formatting options and GIF stickers might find their way to the Tweet composer. In addition, the full-page ads tested in Fleets might also be reproduced elsewhere on the platform after Twitter assesses their performance and tests it in more places.

The top bar of the timeline will now be home to just Spaces, Twitter’s Clubhouse rival.

We’re winding down Fleets on August 3. We weren’t seeing the impact we’d like to see from a big bet, so we’re going to pivot our focus elsewhere 🧵 https://t.co/5aAXh7Y9a3
— Kayvon Beykpour (@kayvz) July 14, 2021

“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. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter,” Ilya Brown, Head of Product, Brand and Video Ads, Twitter, announced on Wednesday.

Last month, Twitter rolled out Ticketed Spaces, and Super Follows to allow creators to monetise. The company is also testing a feature that will enable people to “unmention themselves” from tweets they don’t want to be involved in without notifying the tweet author.

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