Twitter to shut down disappearing 'fleets'

Twitter Inc says it will shut down its ephemeral posts feature called "fleets" on August 3 after the product failed to gain traction with users.

The shutdown comes just eight months after the social media platform rolled out fleets to all its users globally and just one month after it began testing advertising within the feature.

In a blog post on Wednesday, Twitter said it had not seen an increase in the number of new users posting fleets as it had hoped.

The company began testing tweets that vanish after 24 hours last March in Brazil.

Fleets were designed to allay the concerns of new users who might be turned off by the public and permanent nature of normal tweets.

Kayvon Beykpour, head of consumer product at Twitter, stressed that this is part of how the company works.

"(Big) bets are risky and speculative, so by definition a number of them won't work," he tweeted.

"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."

with AP