Twitter’s Fleets Will Be Gone

Twitter is shutting down the Fleets feature with its disappearing tweets.

Ephemeral tweeting is no more: Twitter will discontinue Fleets next August. Originally, the feature was inspired by Snapchat’s success with its disappearing chat messages.

Evidently, this gimmick doesn’t work out for Twitter, where people share thoughts, ideas, news, jokes, memes, and sporadic outbursts of inadequacy publicly.

Naturally, users may want to access some tweets later to use as a reference source or to put them in a quote. It seems that the idea that your potentially significant tweets may be gone forever didn’t go well with the tweeters.

In a farewell tweet, the platform confessed that at first, Fleets was a very promising idea. But now Twitter’s team is going to focus on other concepts and gimmicks.

“We had big hopes for Fleets, but now it’s time to say goodbye and take flight with other ideas. Starting August 3, Fleets will no longer be available.
More on what we learned and what's coming”

Fleets will become fully defunct on August 3. The last line from the statement says “we're sorry, or you're welcome”, which implies that Fleets received its portion of criticism from the community.

Instead, Twitter will focus attention on improving the camera features, bringing in better GIF integration, and so forth. Another concept that Twitter has in the workshop can be dubbed ‘More Privacy”. 

It includes features like protecting your account from toxicity, limiting access to your tweets, deactivating your account temporarily if it is besieged by haters, and so on.

It seems they also plan to employ AI more and more. One of the examples of the “bot brains” being put to work is a smart algorithm, which warns you that you want to use a non-public account for public tweeting.