Twitter to complete delayed deployment of fleets by Friday
Twitter has addressed most of the performance issues with its short-lived new product “fleets” and plans to complete the global launch by Friday, the company’s product manager said in a live video Thursday.
In the first 24 hours of deployment, we ran into some charging performance issues, said Kayvon Beykpour, product manager for Twitter.
We have since detected most of the issues that we were concerned about in terms of the slowdown in deployment … we hope that certainly within the next 24 hours just about everyone will have it, he said.
Beykpour also acknowledged the privacy and security concerns that some early users raised about fleets, or tweets that automatically disappear after 24 hours, but said those issues would mostly be addressed in subsequent updates.
Twitter initially started launching fleets on Tuesday, after testing it in a handful of countries, but then slowed down the rollout in an effort to address performance and stability issues.
Critics said the tool created worrying opportunities for online harassment, such as allowing unwanted direct messages, which would be more difficult to deal with with a fleeting product. It also allows fleet perpetrators to tag people who have blocked them.
Beykpour said Twitter would remove links from those tags the next day to resolve the blocking issues, but that it would take longer to find “better solutions” for the other issues.
I can’t promise it will be a quick fix overnight, but we are absolutely thinking about it, he said.
