Welcome to the Tech Mem Ride Home for Wednesday, March 4th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today.

You already know tweets, but let me introduce you to fleets. Robin Hood explains its outages.

Google Assistant can now read you web pages out loud. Netlify is an interesting

raise and why getting a big-name VC in your seed round might actually be detrimental to your startup.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Twitter is starting to test what it is calling fleets, which is a new feature that will allow

users to make posts that will disappear over a short period of time.

Fleets cannot be retweeted or liked. If you post

fleets, the only way you can get feedback is via direct message. Instead of showing up in your

regular timeline, fleets will only be viewable if you tap on a user's

avatar. Testing is beginning in Brazil only for now, but yes, even Twitter admits that this is its effort to create its own version of stories.

Here's a tweet storm from Twitter's Kavon Bake Poor explaining their thinking, quote,

everyday people come to Twitter to see what's happening.

One of the unique things about Twitter is that what's happening is fueled by people sharing

their thoughts openly through tweets.

But sharing your thoughts publicly can be intimidating. People often tell us they don't

feel comfortable tweeting because tweets can be seen and replied to by anybody.

Feel permanent and performative. How many likes and retweets will this get, etc.

He then went on to explain fleets and how they work, quoting again from later in the thread,

I know what you're thinking, this sounds a lot like stories. Yes, there are many similarities

with the stories format that will feel familiar to people. There are also a few intentional differences

to make the experience more focused on sharing and seeing people's thoughts.

...