What you need to know
- Twitter's launching Fleets, a new format inspired by Snapchat and Instagram.
- It's essentially ephemeral "stories" content that'll last for no longer than 24 hours.
- The company tested Fleets in India, Brazil, and South Korea over the last few months.
Twitter today announced the global launch of Fleets, an ephemeral content format that is heavily inspired by Snapchat stories. If you've used Snapchat, Instagram, or even WhatsApp in the past year, you should be quite familiar with the format and its rules.
In essence, Fleets are stories on Twitter that can be shared with your followers. If you're following someone who posts Fleets, they will then appear in a new row at the top of the Twitter feed, and they'll only last for 24 hours. The takes away some of the permanence that defines the platform, but Twitter says it results in encouraging people to post more, confident in the transience of their fleeting thoughts.
Twitter explained the rationale behind Fleets in a blog post:
Fleets are for sharing momentary thoughts – they help start conversations and only stick around for 24 hours. Through our tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, we learned Fleets helped people feel more comfortable joining the conversation – we saw people with Fleets talk more on Twitter. Those new to Twitter found Fleets to be an easier way to share what's on their mind. Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings. These are early findings from our tests and we're excited to learn more about how Fleets are used by you.
Fleets is going to launch today with support for all the basic features including sharing photos, videos, and commenting on Tweets in Fleets. In a future update, Twitter will add support for stickers and live broadcasting.
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