This week we welcomed another social media update to our timelines, Twitter has rolled out their take on disappearing ‘stories’. Twitter Fleets allow users to share photos, text and repost tweets in posts that vanish in 24 hours.
The Fleets update has come as almost every other popular social platform has introduced temporary content options to their users. It’s not hard to guess what inspired this new feature.
This new feature has been widely discussed around the *virtual* CG office, with some Account Managers questioning the need for this kind of feature on a platform that is primarily text-based. Many users use Twitter to stay up to date on current affairs and aren’t necessarily interested in anything more than the commentary that appears on their timelines.
Twitter users in general seem very split over the new feature and this latest update has triggered a barrage of memes where people have added ‘stories’ to things like Microsoft Excel to express how ‘pointless’ they consider this update.
Other users have complained about lagging on their app after the update, saying they’re unable use the new product. If Twitter is already overwhelmed by user demand for Fleets, this could be an early sign of success. If users had no interest, they might not have bothered updating their apps at all to try out Fleets.
It would be great, at this point, if social media platforms offered some opt-in or opt-out functions for new features. This would feed into the ‘personalised user experience’ narrative that social platforms often say they are working towards.
Hannah Lymn: Social Media Specialist 