Within the panorama of the it is normal to create a chain reaction every time a new trend appears. With the rise of we have seen how Instagram, Facebook and even Youtube have chosen to develop their own alternative to the short video app. Similarly it happened with Club House and voice chats. All these commitments to new trends are part of an effort to maintain and grow communities specific to each tool.
Nevertheless, emulating successful trends does not always equate to success per se. This has been shown by some forgettable failures like on Facebook. In this same order of ideas, Twitter has announced the fleets farewell for next August 3, the alternative version to Instagram stories, which debuted less than a year ago on Jack Dorey’s social network.
Fleet failed to capture new users
According to , on November 17, 2020, Twitter launched the Fleet tool with the idea of providing a means for users of this social network to express your most ephemeral thoughts without the pressure that uploading them definitively in the public conversation of the platform could present.
Similarly, it was hoped that this new tool would help expand the community twittera, which has lagged behind compared to other social networks such as Facebook or Instagram. However, this innovation did not achieve its goal and this is recognized by the Twitter Product Manager Ilya Brown:
“We thought Fleets would help people feel more comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, at the time we made it available to everyone, we haven’t seen the increase we expected in the number of new people joining the conversation through Fleets.”
Since its launch, Twitter has not revealed information about the use of this tool.Not even when a few weeks ago it tried to embed ads within it. What I saw in retrospect could have been a last attempt to give life to this section, whose use has been diverted towards the amplification of tweets. In other words, most users who manage fleets do so in order to give their own tweets more visibility. For this reason, the company has decided to permanently remove them and announced it in a tweet from the platform’s official profile.
we’re removing Fleets on August 3, working on some new stuff
we’re sorry or you’re welcome
—Twitter (@Twitter)
Every crisis creates opportunities
Regardless, Fleets’ farewell isn’t a complete loss for Twitter. From what I learned with this application plan to create other opportunities for the integration of new users to the public conversation and to improve the general experience of the platform.
For the most part, fleets are used for share multimedia content such as images or videos, incorporating them in a more dynamic way to the conversation. Based on this observation, Twitter plans to test some updates to the tweet editor, integrated the Fleets editor to the camera. Among these integrations we could see the full screen camera Y formatting options for textas well as the GIF stickers.
Finally, Twitter has made it clear that it is in a evolution process marked by the arrival of other new functions, such as -its alternative to the trend of voice chats marked by ClubHouse last year- and the most recent, its paid subscription solution that offers users new and exclusive tools such as the option of undo tweets.
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