Twitter announced that it is testing a new feature, called ‘Fleets’, the Stories equivalent on other platforms.
The company announced on Wednesday (04.03.20) it will begin to trial ‘Fleets,’ in Brazil.
The move has been met with criticism and uproar worldwide under the hashtag #RIPTwitter.
Twitter users are not pleased that the social networking site is now no different from other apps and that instead of giving them features they actually want like the edit button, they roll out fleets instead.
With that said, here are the things you should know about Fleets.
Fleets can only be accessed by tapping on a user’s avatar. Fleets will not show up in the regular timeline, so they shouldn’t be too obtrusive for people who strongly dislike story-type content.
You could visit someone’s public Twitter profile and tap to view their Fleets even if you don’t follow them. But their Fleet won’t circulate Twitter’s network, show up in Search or Moments, and it can’t be embedded on an external website.
Unlike Tweets, Twitter’s new Fleets can’t receive Likes, Replies or Retweets. And they’ll disappear entirely after 24 hours.
Users will be able to post videos up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds in length (or 512MB). Whitelisted publishers will be able to publish videos up to 10 minutes in length.
Users can also post multiple Fleets, which viewers will move through using gestures.
To view the multiple Fleets a user has posted, you swipe down instead of advancing through the Fleets horizontally with taps on the sides of the screen. Meanwhile, to move to the next person’s Fleet, you swipe to the left.
Twitter says it determines which Fleets to display first based how recent the fleet is and mutual follows.
According to the Search engine journal, the company is doing this in an effort to make people more comfortable with sharing content on Twitter. Some users are not happy that their tweets can be replied to by anybody and have metrics associated with them such as likes and retweets.
Users also say that tweets feel more permanent, even though they can be manually deleted at any point in time.
Twitter users globally have been asking for the option to edit tweets ever since the service launched in 2006.
As reported by The Sauce in January 2020, Dorsey was asked if there’ll be an edit button for Twitter in 2020. He replies, with a faint smile: “The answer is no.”
Snapchat pioneered the concept of content that disappears after 24 hours in 2013, and many platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, YouTube and LinkedIn have since released their own versions.
