Twitter shocks, says will kill its Instagram Stories-like Fleets - how Tesla chief Elon Musk reacted

Twitter surprised its users last year when it introduced Twitter Fleets, an implementation of the ephemeral “stories” feature that was made popular by Snapchat and Instagram. The decision of the microblogging service received a mixed response but has apparently seen low adoption by users since it was launched. The company has now announced that it will shut down the Fleets feature after eight months on the platform. Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to the announcement by tweeting to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking for a new feature for Twitter DMs. Musk tweeted an emoji of folded hands and wrote “A new laughing emoji on DMs would be great”. Sarcasm? You decide.

What are Twitter Fleets: Introduced last year, the feature allowed users to post images, short videos and even share tweets as ephemeral stories that would disappear after a period of 24 hours, presumably to encourage users to share content that they might not be comfortable with sharing permanently on the platform.

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Twitter Fleets gone Spaces up: On August 3, the Fleets feature will be shut down and users will be able to see ongoing Spaces at the top of the app in the row where Fleets used to appear. Twitter also says that the tweet composer and the in-app camera will gain features from the Fleets composer in the future, such as the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers on top of regular media.

Vertical ads killed? Meanwhile, the company says it will continue to study the vertical ads that it recently introduced to Fleets, but it isn’t clear at the moment if they will show up in the app at a later stage.

Why Twitter Fleets are being killed: “We built Fleets as a lower-pressure, ephemeral way for people to share their fleeting thoughts. 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. Because of this, on August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.” the company’s VP of Product Ilya Brown wrote in a blog post.