Hot on the heels of Whatsapp’s new dark mode feature, Twitter is now testing its own version of Stories.
The company announced that their Stories format is called Fleets. Trials are being carried out in Brazil for the time being.
Fleets will allow Twitter users to post photos, videos, and text that disappears entirely after 24 hours. Unlike tweets, Fleets can’t receive likes, replies or retweets. This probably sounds familiar because most of the other popular social platforms have already been using this format.
Snapchat invented stories in 2013 and the app became a major hit. Instagram copied it soon after. Facebook Inc. eventually brought it to its products, namely Facebook, WhatsApp, and Messenger. The rest have also hopped on the bandwagon – YouTube got Stories (“Reels”), Skype got Stories (“Highlights”), heck even LinkedIn is on this!
Testers in Brazil simply click on the “+” button to post on their Fleet. Consumers can post videos up to 2 minutes and 20 seconds in length (or 512MB). So which Fleets will be displayed first on the home screen? For now, Twitter determines the displays first based on recency and mutual follows.
Twitter will run the test for a few months before deciding to roll out to global markets.
Sources: Tech Crunch, Buzzfeed.
