Today Twitter announced a test, limited to Brazil, of a major new feature for the social service: Fleets, which take their inspiration from the Stories feature found on Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook.

Fleets, short for “fleeting tweets,” live at the top of your timeline just like stories do in other social media apps, and they disappear after 24 hours. Multiple fleets can be written in a day and include text, images, GIFs, and videos, but the way they are interacted with is different than a standard tweet. There’s no way to retweet or reply to someone’s tweet in a public sense; instead, followers can react to a fleet via DM, or a reaction which is sent via DM. Presumably this means that if someone’s DMs are closed, only people they follow can respond to their fleets.

This new test was announced by Twitter Product Lead Kayvon Beykpour in a series of tweets where you can see both images and video of fleets being demoed.

Normally tests of new features, especially ones as limited as this, wouldn’t necessarily merit reporting on because there’s a good chance they may not come to fruition in full release. Fleets, however, are a major new functionality for Twitter and they have clearly had a lot of work poured into them. They’re also a reflection of where other social media services have already moved, making it highly likely that they’ll eventually get a wide release on Twitter, in some form or another.

Although I’m not a big user of ephemeral sharing on other services, and that’s unlikely to change here, I’m nevertheless happy to see Twitter continue pouring work into evolving its product. If fleets do get a worldwide release in the future, I’ll be interested to see if they cause the quality of timelines to improve as tweets are reserved for more important statements while fleets house everything else.

Yesterday, Twitter rolled out a useful new feature that makes it easier to append new tweets to a past thread in its iOS app. Although you could already find an old thread and add to it, the new feature lets you do so from inside the compose field. That way, you can start a fresh tweet and decide after you’ve written it that you want to tack it onto an old thread.

The mechanic is simple. From the tweet compose view, pull down. Your most recent tweet will appear so you can continue it as a thread. Alternatively, there’s also an ellipses button next to ‘Continue Thread’ that you can tap, and all of your tweets come into view in reverse chronological order. Pick one, and the tweet you were composing is added to that thread. If you have second thoughts, there’s still an option to remove the tweet from the thread before tapping the Tweet button and sending the new message.

Twitter announced the feature with a tweet that includes a GIF demonstrating how it works:

https://twitter.com/Twitter/status/1230267622903689225

Features like this have slowly but surely led me to start using the official Twitter app again. It’s been a painful process after years of using third-party Twitter clients, and I’m still doing a lot of my tweet reading in Tweetbot where I have an extensive collection of muted terms. Yet, as my overall time using the service has waned a little, I’ve found that the features that I can’t get from third-party apps have drawn me in more and more.