We hardly knew you: Twitter's disappearing tweets feature Fleets is gone for good

Twitter's Fleets is no more.

On Tuesday, the social media platform shut down the feature where users could share text, photos, videos and tweets that disappeared in 24 hours – similar to rival Snapchat – due to the lack of new user engagement.

The end of Fleets, which debuted last November, came nearly three weeks after Twitter announced the move. The company gave a sendoff in what other way, in a pair of tweets.

But that didn't stop some users from reportedly having a bit of, shall we say, fun with a rather risqué farewell to Fleets late Monday before they disappeared on Tuesday.

Twitter had no comment, opting to just let Fleets fly the coop.

In a blog post on July 13, Ilya Brown, Twitter's head of product said Fleets was built to be "a lower-pressure, ephemeral way people to share their fleeting thoughts," especially for new users to use the platform.

But Fleets didn't flourish. It was mostly used by those "who are already Tweeting to amplify their own Tweets and talk directly with others," Brown said. While the goal was to engage users who don't like to tweet or maybe aren't as concerned about how many "retweets" or "likes" they get per se, but to casually share their thoughts on the social platform that, well at times, can be brutal.

"We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter," Brown said in the blog post. "However, we haven’t seen an increase in the amount of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like (as) we hoped."

This rare admission of a product miss for Twitter comes as it has recently added new features for its 199 million daily active users including Spaces, the social media platform's response to audio chat hit Clubhouse; a Tip Jar, which allows users to send money directly to their favorite accounts; and Blue, a new subscription service that offers 'Undo Tweet' function currently for users only in Canada and Australia.

Investors seemed to like the move as Twitter's stock has remained steady since the announcement of no more Fleets.

What's interesting about Twitter discontinuing Fleets altogether is that the company has a pattern of taking the best assets of a feature and integrating it into the overall product. Remember the hype over Twitter Moments, "curated stories about what’s happening around the world" via tweets in 2015 that was later morphed into the Explore tab? And then there was Periscope, the once-popular Twitter-owned live video streaming app that shut down in March but is a part of Twitter's overall functionality. Periscope's co-founder, Kayvon Beykpour, is currently Twitter's consumer product head.

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Brown said Twitter will conduct tests to try incorporating features from the Fleets composer including "the full-screen camera, text formatting options, and GIF stickers," into Twitter's product. As of now, Fleets doesn't seem to have a similar fate as Moments and Periscope yet, as Beykpour intimated in a series of tweets on Wednesday.

"We weren’t seeing the impact we’d like to see from a big bet, so we’re going to pivot our focus elsewhere," Beykpour said. "We’re still very focused on building tools that inspire new forms of conversation on Twitter so you’ll see us taking these learnings into new bets."

"And just to make a point of our internal philosophy clear: big bets are risky and speculative, so by definition, a number of them won’t work," Beykpour added. "If we’re not having to wind down features every once in a while, then it would be a sign that we’re not taking big enough swings."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Twitter Fleets: Disappearing tweets feature a goner after 7 months