Twitter is soon introducing Snapchat like stories and the company is calling these fleets — these will be posts that appear in a separate timeline above the main timeline for 24 hours before disappearing. The implementation looks nearly identical to Instagram’s version of the feature. Fleets are currently being tested internally among employees in addition to the test in Brazil.
“Twitter is for having conversations about what you care about,” Mo Aladham, a Twitter group product manager, said in a blog post. “But, some of you tell us that you’re uncomfortable to tweet because tweets are public, feel permanent, and have public counts (retweets and likes). We want to make it possible for you to have conversations in new ways with less pressure and more control, beyond tweets and direct messages. That’s why starting today in Brazil, we’re testing fleets, a new way to start conversations from your fleeting thoughts.”
To create a fleet, users will tap a plus button that appears on a new home row of ephemeral posts on top of your home timeline. From there, you can type up to 280 characters of text or add photos, GIFs, or videos. Once you hit post, your fleet will appear in a lightly ranked side-scrolling row of posts. Fleets from people you follow and who follow you back will appear first, with the most recently posted visible first. From there, you’ll see posts from other accounts that you follow.
It should be noted that you cannot like or retweet a fleet. Instead, users can be able respond to fleets with reaction emoji similar to those that were recently introduced in direct messages. You can also respond with text, which will open up a DM with the person you’re messaging.
Fleets represent an opportunity for Twitter to gain some of the ground it has lost to Facebook, Snapchat, and other social platforms over the years as ephemeral messaging has become more popular. It’s not just that the tweets will disappear automatically (although that helps); it’s that stories seem to encourage a different kind of sharing — more disposable, more casual, more intimate. The main feed is for polished public performance, and stories are more about idle chitchat.
