This week, Twitter announced that it will begin testing a new sharing feature called Fleets. As foreshadowed a couple of weeks back with the acquisition of Chroma Labs, Twitter has now revealed that it is testing ephemeral tweets that will disappear in 24 hours. The test is going on in Brazil, as well as internally among Twitter employees. Fleets appear in carousel at the top of your home timeline, much like Instagram and Snapchat Stories — with a plus-sign button over one’s own profile image to add one’s own fleet. Fleets will also have a limit of 280 characters, like regular tweets, with the option to add images, videos, or GIFs, but it can not be liked or retweeted (re-fleeted?).
The company believes Fleets can help address one of the primary reasons why users don’t tweet: they feel uncomfortable with Twitter’s public nature. In a statement, product manager Mo Aladham said the company wants, with fleets, “to make it possible for you to have conversations in new ways with less pressure and more control.” Twitter previously hinted at CES in January it would soon test new controls for determining the audience for your Tweets — like public, followers only, and so on. But according to TechCrunch, those tests haven’t yet begun, we understand.
Twitter is one of the last major social networks to test out a Stories format. The format was first popularized by Snapchat, and later adopted by of Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, and others. Music streaming platform Spotify also recently announced a test of a Stories-like feature and even Microsoft’s Skype, Match and Bumble have cut their teeth on it.
This unprecedented pivot comes right after activist investor Elliott Management Corp. acquired a stake in Twitter to push for changes at the social network. The investment firm believes Twitter isn’t living up to its potential and that its CEO Jack Dorsey is distracted by side projects and by his other CEO job at Square.
