Twitter in November debuted a new ephemeral tweet option called "Fleets," with the feature designed to compete with Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, Snapchat, and more.
Fleets apparently did not catch on, because Twitter today announced that Fleets are being discontinued as of August 3, which is less than a year after the feature launched.
Twitter says that it had hoped Fleets would help people "feel more comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," but there hasn't been an increase of people joining Twitter with Fleets as Twitter expected.
We're evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation. A number of these updates, like Fleets, are speculative and won't work out. We'll be rigorous, evaluate what works, and know when to move on and focus elsewhere. If we're not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while - we're not taking big enough chances. We'll continue to build new ways to participate in conversations, listening to feedback and changing direction when there may be a better way to serve people using Twitter.
Going forward, Twitter says that it will use what it learned from Fleets to focus on creating other ways for people to "join the conversation" and will find new ways to address "what holds people back from participating on Twitter."
Twitter also plans to test updates to the Tweet composer and camera that will incorporate Fleets features like text formatting, full screen camera for photo taking, and GIF stickers.
