Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation – it’s where you go to see what’s happening and talk about it. But some of you tell us that Tweeting is uncomfortable because it feels so public, so permanent, and like there’s so much pressure to rack up Retweets and Likes. That’s why, unfortunately, there are so many 🔥 Tweets left in drafts! To help people feel more comfortable, we’ve been working on a lower pressure way for people to talk about what’s happening. Today, we're launching Fleets so everyone can easily join the conversation in a new way – with their fleeting thoughts.
Joshua Harris & Sam Haveson
Basically Twitter’s version of Stories, fleets disappear after 24h and are separate from the main timeline, showing up in a horizontal row at the top – in the smartphone apps for now, there are no fleets in the web app for the moment. They do not fit particularly well with the everyday Twitter experience, without likes or retweets, and I suspect their introduction may have been a condition imposed on Twitter by Elliott Management back in early March, when it tried to gain control over Twitter and replace its CEO, Jack Dorsey. (I do not remember jack ever posting a fleet, which may support this assumption.)
In its current form, fleets are too derivative of similar features in other apps, such as Instagram, they bring almost nothing new to users. In my own timelines few bother to fleet, as the novelty wore off after less than a month. Then again, I had similar impressions about Instagram Stories when they launched – they later proved massively successful and I must confess I now enjoy stories more than I would have expected.
I feel that Twitter could have experimented more with the delivery format and the user interface here. I would have liked to see fleets embedded in the main Twitter timeline: a fleets is taller that a text-based tweet, usually covering the full height of a mobile screen, but the app could snap one into view and let the user swipe right to reveal other fleets from that person, or scroll down for other tweets. That is what the Google News app does for example: you scroll down for new headlines, but from time to time there are collections of articles on the same topic, where you navigate to the right to read more. Because fleets lack likes or retweets, the difference between tweets and fleets would be fairly obvious. Or Twitter could have created a distinct timeline for fleets, but arranged top-to-bottom like the home timeline, and let users switch between them by swiping left-right.
Personally I am more excited to be able to share tweets natively to Instagram Stories, although it might take a while until this arrives on Android. This type of integration has already launched with Snapchat on iOS.
This is a feature built for social media apps as they are today: places to repost tweets. As I’m writing this, two out of the top 10 posts on Reddit are tweets. Instagram is filled with pages that post screenshots of tweets, and Facebook, I’m told, is mostly people posting tweets (Twitter, of course, is full of old Tumblr posts). Now, Snapchat can also be Twitter, and Instagram Stories’ time is coming.
Mitchell Clark
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