Introducing 'Fleets': Tweets That Disappear From Twitter After 24 Hours

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Fleets, a new Twitter feature, is a gamechanger for its users.

According to an article by Engadget, the social networking site is making its way to ephemeral content as its developers are testing a new feature, called "fleets," which allows users to post tweets that automatically deletes themselves after 24 hours.

As the term says, ephemeral content, is rich media that is only accessible temporarily, usually 24 hours, before it disappears infinitely.

Contents may vary from photos, live-stream videos, product demos, narrative stories, and more.

Currently, people can publish ephemeral content on three major social media platforms: Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram.

As of this writing, Twitter's experimental feature can only be used by people in Brazil, but Twitter says other countries will eventually make use of it soon. Once launched in a global scale, this feature could fundamentally change the way people interact on Twitter.

Fleets allow users to share "fleeting thoughts" they might not be comfortable posting, according to Kayvon Beykpour, the company's product lead. And, since fleets will only be visible to an account's followers, it enables to control who sees their fleets.

"We're hoping that Fleets can help people share the fleeting thoughts that they would have been unlikely to Tweet," he wrote in a seven-part post on Twitter.

According to Beykpour, fleets will function more like Instagram Stories than normal tweets. Like tweets, fleets are text-based, but you can also add photos and GIFs.

What sets it apart from other social media platforms is that the ephemeral posts appear separately from your main timeline and followers won't be able to reply, like, or publicly comment on any of the fleets.

But like Instagram Stories, users won't be able to embed or link to content posted as a fleet. Also, fleets will appear when a user's profile picture is clicked.

Since Twitter was launched, people have been asking for a delete button but up until now, the company has been hesitant to make changes that could alter the "permanence" of tweets.

Still, Twitter's users have shown potential that the said feature would take off, shown by the growing popularity of services that automatically delete your old tweets.

According to Engadget, fleets is a potential solution since these semi-private tweets disappear after a day.

Twitter is rolling out fleets to its iOS and Android app in Brazil, but has not disclose future plans for its disappearing posts.

Meanwhile, such changes prompted the hashtag #RIPTwitter to trend as users complained the new feature would make Twitter too similar to other social networking platforms.

Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and took off July of the same year.

The platform rapidly gained popularity in a global scale and in 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and an average of 1.6 billion search queries were received per day.

In 2013, it was listed as one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as "the SMS of the Internet".

As of 2018, the platform had more than 321 million monthly active users.

Whether Twitter users will increase or decrease due to the emergence of Fleet feature, that is yet to be determined.