Twitter has introduced a new feature called “Fleets” which will appear at the top of your Twitter account, right below the icon. The new feature will facilitate people to share their personal thoughts for a short period of time which they don’t want on their profiles in the longer run.
The fleet-like feature is not new to the world of social media. On Facebook and Instagram, the feature has been widely used as ‘Story’ which also appears on the top of the profile and disappears after a period of 24-hour.
The feature was tested in India, Italy, South Korea and Brazil on Tuesday, and was rolled out gloablly on Wednesday.
The design director of the micro-blogging in a press conference said the feature is introduced to make people more comfortable and active on the platform.
“We’ve seen Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings,” Joshua Harris, Twitter’s Director of Design said during a press conference. He is also talking about unveiling a new feature called Audio Spaces, which will help users in hosting discussions on the platform. The feature will be tested first and then released.
“A lot of people don’t tweet. With retweets and replies, it feels like a burden to tweet. People lurk draft tweets and then do not send them. Fleets create a lower pressure way to join the conversation. It’ll make people more comfortable to join the conversation, because it’s just for a day, and it won’t be around forever. We’ve also seen more people joining conversations on Twitter, and we’ve seen that people new to Twitter are more comfortable,” Harris said during the press conference.
Fleets can not be shared further with users once disappeared. However, if you want to save them, you can always take screenshots. As the feature has been rolled out to share personal thoughts, they cannot be shared, liked or being commented at. People can respond to them, but the replies will only be visible to original tweeter as direct messages.
Talking about Fleets, Sam Haveson, product manager, in a blog post said that fleets are a “lower pressure” way to communicate “fleeting thoughts” unlike the permanent tweets which are available for public response.
Image Credit: Google
