Twitter kills off ephemeral ‘fleets’, a year after launch

Twitter is disappearing its disappearing tweets, called fleets, after they didn’t catch on.

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.

“However, we haven’t seen an increase in the amount of new people joining the conversation with Fleets like we hoped,” Twitter said in a statement Wednesday. “So as of August 3, Fleets will no longer be available on Twitter.”