Twitter has announced it's shutting down Fleets, the disappearing-tweet feature it launched last year to compete with Snapchat and Instagram Stories.
The company will pull the plug on the option on August 3 after it failed to gain traction with users.
Fleets' time on the platform was short-lived: Twitter began testing the feature in March 2020 and rolled it out globally in November of that year.
It had just begun testing advertising within the feature last month.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Ilya Brown, Twitter's head of product, brand and video ads, said users hadn't taken to the option the way the company had predicted.
'We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts,' Brown said.
'We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter. But, 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.'
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Twitter will pull the plug on its 'disappearing tweet' feature, Fleets, on August 3, just eight months after it launched globally. 'We haven't seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,' said Twitter's Ilya Brown
Brown said the company is always trying to improve and some updates 'are speculative and won't work out.'
'We're evolving what Twitter is, and trying bigger, bolder things to serve the public conversation,' he added.
'If we're not evolving our approach and winding down features every once in a while – we're not taking
