Twitter's Launch of Fleets: Lag, Some Crashes, Bugs, Skepticism and Cat Pics (cnet.com) 30
CNET reports on Twitter's rocky rollout of "fleets" which disappear after 24 hours:
In a blog post, Twitter said global tests of the feature indicated the tool helped people feel more comfortable joining public conversations on the service. "Those new to Twitter found Fleets to be an easier way to share what's on their mind," the company said. "Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions and feelings."
And, apparently, sharing cat content. "Don't really care for fleets," one wrote, "but the fact that 90% of the ones I've seen so far have cats in them brings me joy...."
The feature's debut Tuesday brought its share of complaints about the product, with some people saying the Fleets froze, lagged or made their Twitter crash. "We're aware of some issues people may be having and are working to fix them," a Twitter spokesperson said.
"Earlier this week, Twitter officially rolled out Fleets, a new feature that — ahem — takes inspiration from Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories," writes Android Central, "and boy do people have opinions on it."
But users should warm up to the feature eventually, experts tell NBC News: [A]lthough users lambasted Fleets...those same users began to use the function almost immediately.
While there are valid critiques of Fleets and how they could be used in regard to misinformation and harassment, experts say the users' first reaction will typically be to resist changes to a site or app that they've grown accustomed to, even though they typically adopt the change as the preferred version of the platform later on.
Yet by the weekend Twitter was already acknowledging its first major bug with fleets, exploitable "through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours," according to The Verge: The "workaround" referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets from public accounts via Twitter's API. The Twitter API doesn't return URLs for fleets that are older than 24 hours, according to the company, and once the fix is rolled out, even if someone has a URL for active fleet, it won't work after the expiration point.
The Verge also points out that "while fleets are only visible on users' timelines for 24 hours, Twitter stores fleets on its back end for up to 30 days, longer for fleets that violate its rules and may require enforcement action, the company says."
And, apparently, sharing cat content. "Don't really care for fleets," one wrote, "but the fact that 90% of the ones I've seen so far have cats in them brings me joy...."
The feature's debut Tuesday brought its share of complaints about the product, with some people saying the Fleets froze, lagged or made their Twitter crash. "We're aware of some issues people may be having and are working to fix them," a Twitter spokesperson said.
"Earlier this week, Twitter officially rolled out Fleets, a new feature that — ahem — takes inspiration from Instagram Stories and Snapchat Stories," writes Android Central, "and boy do people have opinions on it."
But users should warm up to the feature eventually, experts tell NBC News: [A]lthough users lambasted Fleets...those same users began to use the function almost immediately.
While there are valid critiques of Fleets and how they could be used in regard to misinformation and harassment, experts say the users' first reaction will typically be to resist changes to a site or app that they've grown accustomed to, even though they typically adopt the change as the preferred version of the platform later on.
Yet by the weekend Twitter was already acknowledging its first major bug with fleets, exploitable "through a technical workaround where some Fleets media URLs may be accessible after 24 hours," according to The Verge: The "workaround" referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets from public accounts via Twitter's API. The Twitter API doesn't return URLs for fleets that are older than 24 hours, according to the company, and once the fix is rolled out, even if someone has a URL for active fleet, it won't work after the expiration point.
The Verge also points out that "while fleets are only visible on users' timelines for 24 hours, Twitter stores fleets on its back end for up to 30 days, longer for fleets that violate its rules and may require enforcement action, the company says."
Re: The Internet in 2020 (Score:2)
You know, I haven't read what you wrote. But today, I agre with yoir general sentiment.
And would like to raise you that clearly, our society as a whole is going batshit insane. All of it.
Wanna go see if some remote tribe is a better place to live, while they still haven't exterminated ALL the species?
Re: The Internet in 2020 (Score:2)
Re: COVID in 2020 (Score:2)
Natural selection at work. Any more questions?
Oh, collateral damage? Yeaaah, I'm sorry, if you keep contact with that society, it's kinda natural selection for you too.
It won't be as advertised (Score:4, Funny)
It can't be. I guarantee there will be several people archiving every post. Just because it might be useful at some point.
Re: It won't be as advertised (Score:2)
You can thank the Content Mafia for that particular delusion. People actually thinking some information can be made public, yet somehow keeping control/"ownership" over it.
I'm sorry, Twitter, ... it's just basic causality disagreeing with that... ^^
Re: It won't be as advertised (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I do not get the point. If they are going to do that, why not just do what the rest of the feather brained do and go out their home and scream it out to their neighbours, every morning ;D.
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I do not get the point. If they are going to do that, why not just do what the rest of the feather brained do and go out their home and scream it out to their neighbours, every morning ;D.
People out the world "wanna be s-o-m-e-b-o-d-y" rather than face their current situations in life.
Twitter-verse gives those sorts of people an outlet to pretend that they are s-o-m-e-b-o-d-y to whom we should pay attention.
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Ah, but once it's off an authoritative server, you can deny having said it. After all, it's just random HTML if it doesn't come from twitter.com.
Re: (Score:2)
That's the reality we live in.
Re: (Score:2)
I mean, that's true. But I can also just make things up, and it's the same attack vector. Better, because I don't have to wait for you to write something to use.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can't archive every tweet. Twitter limits access to its APIs and doesn't provide a "every tweet ever published" API at all.
What you can do is archive particular accounts, but Twitter officially bans even that except where there is a genuine reason, like Trump tweets being part of the official record now.
Obviously if you are Elon Musk this feature may be of limited use and probably won't protect you from an SEC investigation, but if you are just some random user they have some utility.
I'd still like to s
Does anyone else think this is batshit insane? (Score:2)
In what world is any of this even close to sane?
Yes, we all see it every day, so we think of it as normal. ...
But if you leave that box
A website for publicly saying thing ... called "blogs" ... but not on your own box ... With the arbitrary rule that "blog" posts it's gonna be too short for any kind of reasonable thoughts ... treated as its main "feature" ... calling itself "twitter"(!!) ... And now, *new*, another utterly trivial "feature" ... that promises things that are literally physically impossible (
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I prefer the name Tweets 4 Twats.
I think of fleets as laxative.
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In what world is any of this even close to sane?
This one.
A website for publicly saying thing ... called "blogs"
Yes?
but not on your own box ...
Most people don't have the techincal knowhow to run their own "box", and for those that do, well, frankly it's not really worth the effort.
With the arbitrary rule that "blog" posts it's gonna be too short for any kind of reasonable thoughts ... treated as its main "feature"
The rule wasn't arbitrary. Twitter used to have a bridge to SMS which is where the 140 charact
Re: (Score:2)
... If by "no one" you mean "no individual" - probably right. If you believe that there aren't third-party companies archiving all that data for use in proprietary ways - definitely wrong. These companies don't advertise exactly what data they have; they just say "we provide reputation scoring based on a variety of data sources including social media".
Re: (Score:1)
Yes and?
If you're worried about someone trawling through past tweets to find something you said while drunk/that you regret/that can be taken out of context... these companies don't matter for the majority of people the majority of the time. They're not going to reveal something that gets them sued and in the vast majority of cases the information held will be inaccessible to most people.
Saying something to a friend 1-1 in an isolated park is more private than publishing something with an ISBN number guaran
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All social media is becoming TikTok (Score:1)
Taking bets on how long til there's an archive? (Score:3)
Someone's going to Internet Archive/Wayback machine this thing and start keeping it all.
They'll start working on it as soon as someone posts something inflammatory and then it vanishes and says it never happened.
Re: (Score:2)
There's really no need because people already do this. Just manually delete the tweet after a while.
That's why you often see screenshots of tweets rather than links, because the links can be deleted but the screenshots cannot.
The Internet STILL remembers everythung (Score:2)
The "workaround" referenced appears to be a developer app that could scrape fleets from public accounts via Twitter's API. The Twitter API doesn't return URLs for fleets that are older than 24 hours, according to the company, and once the fix is rolled out, even if someone has a URL for active fleet, it won't work after the expiration point.
This was inevitable. Anyone who would post a text that is intentionally transient must have something to hide, right? So now there is already a Wayback Machine for these messages.
Twitter is already shit (Score:2)
Not because what people tweet about is shit, but because of the shit interface.
Twitter lets you reply to tweets, but doesn't provide a convenient way to see what the reply chain looks like. You can only reasonably follow the chain from the bottom, and you have to click to each replied-to tweet to see where you came from.
As such, twitter is the most worthless of the social networks.
Poor choice of names (Score:2)
A company called Fleet makes enemas.
My opinion (Score:1)