LinkedIn is pulling the plug on its version of Stories. The information to that effect was sent as an email to Matt Navarra, a respected social media commentator. In the email, LinkedIn said the feature will be retired on September 30.
In a tweet on Tuesday, Matt posted a screenshot of the email sent by the professional social media company. Apparently, the email was not sent to every user—the first paragraph did address page admins.
That said, not everyone will shed a tear for a feature that did not really win a lot of hearts. I personally did not get to use it that much, and I am sure this can be said for some other users out there.
The mail states in part: “Starting September 30, Page admins will no longer be able to upload Stories to LinkedIn, and members will not be able to view them.”
Users, however, will still be able to use Stories through the end of this month. LinkedIn advised that you pause any further creative development for Stories after that time. LinkedIn as expected promised to work on new format that better supports the needs of its users.
What really is the point in keeping LinkedIn Stories? The feature did not really live up to expectation. Unlike Instagram and Snapchat that have over the years make a success of revolutionizing Stories; a few apps have managed to compete.
Just last month Twitter pulled the plug on Fleets—blaming lack of patronage. In a blog post, the social media giant said the decision to retire the Story clone was due to lack of interest from users.
Fleets may not have lived to Twitter’s expectations, but the truth is that the social media giant has its heart set on some other projects. Perhaps, Twitter seems more focused on making its Spaces feature a huge success and is not prepared for the “distraction” it got from Fleets.
Fleets is barely eight months old, and that is hardly enough time for it to make enough impression. Perhaps, Twitter should have given Fleet a little more time to evolve—but all that is in the past now.
Other social media companies like Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp are getting all the attention they needed with ephemeral stories; it just did not work with Twitter.
Fleets is not different from Stories—made popular by Snapchat, then improved upon by Instagram. You can share texts, respond to other people’s tweets, and post videos with similar background color—with all these disappearing within 24 hours just like you have with Instagram and Snapchat.
