Twitter wants you do do more than just post tweets on the platform.
The social media giant is introducing new features for users to interact with.
Twitter is now making Fleets available for everyone.
Fleets was announced in early March and are ephemeral posts that disappear after 24 hours.
This format introduced by Snapchat as Stories and later copied by other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn is now on Twitter.
Unlike regular tweets, these Stories can’t be retweeted, liked or have public replies – you’ll have to slide in the DMs for that.
You will only be able to react to Fleets or respond to them with direct messages.
Just like Stories on Instagram, Fleets will appear on the top of your regular feed. They won’t appear in the middle of your timeline.
Fleets can quote tweets with reactions and include videos (with a 30-second limit), text, links, GIFs or single photos.
If you want to share a tweet in a fleet, you’ll have to go to the bottom of the tweet and tap on the share icon and then click on “Share in Fleet.”
Twitter is also looking to include the ability to attach dynamic stickers such as polls or Q&As – Instagram Stories already has these features.
It’s worth noting that Fleets will be subject to Twitter’s rules and that the platform will add various labels such as those for false or misleading content.
Twitter hopes that this new feature will enable people to be more free to post what’s on their mind without fear that these said posts will come to haunt them later in life.
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“People feel more comfortable joining conversations on Twitter with this ephemeral format because what they’re saying lives just for a moment instead of feeling like it’s around forever,” said Twitter design director Joshua Harris.
Hopefully, Twitter also introduced self-destructing tweets too – it’s a long shot but a guy can dream, right?
Twitter Fleets: Compilation Of The Best Reactions
More Twitter features were also announced today.
Twitter is expanding testing voice tweets. Audio tweets were announced in mid-June this year and this new feature was received with mixed reactions.
Voice tweets are now being tested in direct messages.
Twitter is also testing something else with the audio format too.
They are introducing audio spaces- a feature popular on Clubhouse – an invitation-only and controversial audio social network platform.
Clubhouse features rooms where you can host certain people and have discussions while other members listen.
Multiple people will have discussions on Twitter’s Audio spaces too. The company didn’t say what controls it will implement.
However, Twitter said that they are rolling out audio spaces to people in marginalized backgrounds and a very small group of women.
“It is a personal matter for me to get this right, and the team is interested, and the company is interested, in hearing first from this group of people on their feedback about audio spaces,” said Maya Gold Patterson, Twitter product designer and a black woman who has faced online harassment on Twitter.
“We are going to launch this first experiment of spaces to a very small group of people, a group of people who are disproportionately impacted by abuse and harm on the platform, women and those from marginalized backgrounds,” she continued.
“The team is interested and the company is interested in hearing first from this group of people on their feedback,” she added.
Twitter hopes this feature will be available by the end of the year.
“It’s no surprise that the typical conversation on Twitter is a short burst of high-brevity exchanges back and forth between multiple people. We need to support other formats. We need to support other use cases that help people have more thoughtful debate, more thoughtful exchanges that you can’t pack into 280 characters. It’s not a ‘here’s an interesting startup doing something interesting, let’s try to replicate it.'” said Kayvon Beykpour, Twitter’s product lead.
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Other features Twitter is working on is giving users the ability to give private feedback to other users when they have crossed a line in form of a notification or Twitter could nudge the user.
Twitter venturing into audio presents new problems when it hasn’t already fixed its current problems when it comes to moderation.
After facing backlash for not including transcription on its audio tweets for people with impaired hearing, the company said that they’re working on transcriptions which will be available next year.
