Saturday, November 9, 2024
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Elon Musk has killed Twitter, but not in the way everyone expected



Twitter owner and former CEO Elon Musk has announced that the social network has a new name. In a change that he’d been alluding to for some time, Twitter is now called X and that’s the branding that is now starting to take over the company’s website.


Visiting x.com today will redirect you to twitter.com, while the familiar blue bird logo has also been replaced with what Musk calls an interim X logo. It remains to be seen what the final logo will look like, but there are surely only so many things you can do with a single-character name.


What’s in a name?

Musk announced the changes over the weekend, saying that Twitter users would soon “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” X is the brand that will replace it, with Twitter already owned by X Holdings. And as a Washington Post report notes, X is also the name of a payment processing company that Musk was behind years ago. That also explains him having access to the presumably well-sought-after x.com web address.

Musk also says that tweets will no longer be called tweets after the transition away from Twitter, something that could take some time for people to get used to.

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino posted a Twitter / X thread saying that “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity,” adding that it will be “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking.” That quote speaks to the heart of what Musk wants to do with X specifically. His aim appears to be to turn X into an all-in-one app that will work in a similar way to WeChat in China. In the case of WeChat, that platform handles everything Yaccarino mentioned in her post and is the go-to app for an entire country. Whether X can become that for the rest of the world, we’ll have to wait and see.

While Musk is no doubt pleased with his transition from Twitter to X, not everyone is convinced. The name change has already been pilloried online, while former head of product Ether Crawford at the company told Musk that he is “destroying your own product or brand.” Others pointed to the fact that Twitter was a “universally-recognizable brand” and that it is now being destroyed.

At this point, the transition away from Twitter is still underway and the X branding still has a long way to go. This could turn out to be a masterstroke in five years’ time, or it could be the beginning of the end for a $44 billion company that is very literally unsure about its own identity at a time when competitors are sprouting up left and right. Instagram’s launch of Threads is a big deal so all eyes will be on what comes next.





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