WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Wednesday, Twitter announced that it will not continue with 'Fleets', the Twitter version of Facebook and Instagram 'stories'. In June, the company had attempted to monetize the Fleets by adding advertisement options to them. But, the failure of the feature to generate engagement has made the company roll it back from August 3.
Kayvon Beykpour, the head of consumer product, tweeted, '(Big) bets are risky and speculative, so by definition, a number of them won't work. 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.'
Old tweets have caused problems for a lot of people and to get rid of this, Twitter had introduced Fleets, which are basically tweets that will expire and disappear after a span of 24 hours. The feature was first launched in November 2020. The company hoped to grab a bite of the success of Snapchat and Facebook stories and increase engagement on the platform.
In a blog post to announce the news, Twitter 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.'
However, the company is ready to learn from its mistakes and shortcomings. 'we'll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter', said the blog. The platform will also look to incorporate the technology used in Fleet to Tweet composer and camera to enrich the experience of the existing users. The post added, 'We'll explore more ways to address what holds people back from participating on Twitter. And for the people who already are Tweeting, we're focused on making this better for you.'
The failure is understood to be a big blow to the company's plans to have 315 million mDAUs or monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023.
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