Twitter Introduces Fleets |
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20 November 2020
This week saw Twitter roll its Snapchat clone feature which they've wittily dubbed "fleets" because it both rhymes with tweets and implies the fleeting nature of them. They are here to stay and will further pollute the screen as Twitter iterates toward Facebook's more profitable revenue model. Snapchat was the first large social media platform to develop disappearing messages, and when they rebuffed Facebook's attempts to purchase them Facebook just went ahead and implemented clones of their product within Instragram, Facebook, and WhatsApp. It seems like this disappearing post feature is an essential one in a market that's increasingly becoming commoditized. Microsoft's LinkedIn network also implemented it earlier this year. As these walled gardens increasingly control how we communicate with eachother and who we communicate with, they are replacing the role of neighborhoods. Whether this is for good or for ill is not really a useful question (short answer: it's both) because social media platforms are here to stay. This Pandora's box cannot be closed; we have to decide how we deal with what's come out of it.