I've been mostly ambivalent about the Musk-era at Twitter—mostly because I just don't care enough to have an opinion.<p>This, though. This one makes me angry and disappointed.<p>Twitter has had such a solid brand for so long. It's accomplished things most marketers only dream of: getting a verb like "Tweet" into the standard lexicon is like the pinnacle of branding. Even with all of the issues, "Twitter" and its "Tweets" have been at the core of international discourse for a decade now.<p>Throwing all of that away so Elon can use a domain he's sat on since '99 seems exceedingly foolish.
The Brand Toolkit page needs updating - <a href="https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit</a>
Not only does it still have the bird it says "Our logo is our most recognizable asset. That’s why we’re so protective of it. Take a moment to think about how you apply it and take a read of our Brand Guidelines for examples of how we like you to use it."
Twitter has managed to get so many words to be common. Like it's a "tweet", not "a post on facebook". It's a "retweet" or "quote tweet", not "something I shared on facebook". Why throw all this deep brand recognition away?<p>It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.
It's not pining, it's passed on! This bird is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! This is a late bird! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed it to the perch, it would be pushing up the daisies! It's run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!<p>This is an x-bird!
I hope that this will push government officials and structures to set up mastodon instances. Like one for the government where each agency has an account.<p>Europe did this [0] and I find that it's a very good idea to have control over communication (plus since it's open anyone can do what they want with the data)<p>[0] <a href="https://social.network.europa.eu/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://social.network.europa.eu/</a>
Do visit <a href="https://xcorp.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://xcorp.com</a> for a hearty laugh (or slightly frightened chuckle, on how life mirrors art).<p><i>X Corp - Non-Human Intelligence (NHI) - UAP Technology
X Corp is one of the largest multinational conglomerates in the world. It is headquartered in the Western Hemisphere and was founded after the consolidated mega-corporate merger between ApostleCorp, The Allied Spacecraft Corporation (ASC), and Tyrell Corporation. It is currently the global leader in the retrieval and reverse-engineering of non-human intelligence technology (NHI).</i><p>Compare to our real-life version of X Corp's CEO, Linda Yaccarino:<p><i>Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.</i><p>(yesterday in what we used to call a Tweet, <a href="https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/lindayacc/status/1683213895463215104</a>)
Y'all are trying to make fun of this, but it's really a brilliant tactical move. Think about it; Musk desperately needs to flip Twitter, and this branding change both makes the site much more attractive for a potential buyout from a porn company, and also lowers the valuation of Twitter even further to the point where it's probably within range for a decently sized porn company to buy.
In case anyone was wondering what news story Musk was trying to bury with his latest stupid PR stunt: <a href="https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/07/tesla-misses-deadline-to-inform-nhtsa-about-autopilot-problems/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/07/tesla-misses-deadline-t...</a>
Meanwhile, the x.com domain seems to be somewhat shambolic.<p>As I write this, it hits a Godaddy parking page.
According to this[0] tweet[1], it's been a Godaddy site, a dead link, a redirect, and now a godaddy site again.<p>Shambles.<p>[0] <a href="https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1683289016723202050" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://twitter.com/rothschildmd/status/1683289016723202050</a><p>[1] No, I'm not calling them X's. That name is saved for those who broke my heart, made me cry, and left me binge watching Notting Hill.
You know, for all the talk about how twitter is going downhill and making stupid decisions, this is the only one so far that really, really, does seems stupid.<p>Verification was bad and now it’s a joke, api rate limits have some possible argument etc - but why in the hell buy a household name just to change it? Why not build X from scratch?
A solid move to instill faith with advertisers that what is left of "the platform formerly known as twitter" will be stable, avoid confusion with their users, and be a brand-positive environment.<p>What's everyone's timetable for either shutdown or sell-off of twitter, 18 months. Ad revenue will continue to shrink, effective 'cost per' rates will decrease while Ex-Twitter will try to squeeze out stable or higher, likely push brands toward longer term campaign spend, engagements so as to reflect long-term dollars on a balance sheet.<p>Only reasonable counterpoint would be if this is part of a strategy to convert X to a portal with Ex-Twitter being one app/platform tied to central identity graph with other services/platforms to be connected later.
For what I can tell, Elon bought Twitter to take it off the stock market, fix it as a private company, creating growth and profitability, and then list it later to make his money back.<p>He sees the X vision to make Twitter become the Everything App, where people turn to it for more than just messaging, but video calls and commerce. Very much like WeChat where it serves as a platform for things like restaurant bookings and hailing a taxi.<p>I do agree though, it doesn't feel like renaming it to X is the right approach if this is the longer term vision. Personally I would have thought about Twitter X with these additional services and a much slower migration to X to align with the Everything App vision.
It’s so embarrassing to me being a Tesla vehicle owner now.<p>And as someone who thought it was awesome he took a drag on Rogan: I hope the government retracts his security clearance and he has to divest his holdings in SpaceX and Tesla. Or Tesla finds a way to separate their identity from Musk. Maybe the FSD fiasco will create a path to that.<p>I hope and believe, at this point, SpaceX and Tesla are thriving despite Elon and have proper adult management.
It is fun to see the fall of Musk, I don't know anyone who defends him at this point, everyone I know (myself included) have changed how we think of him since he acquired twitter. He has become an egocentric man with need for acceptance.
Elon's acquisition of Twitter is a gift that just keeps on giving. At this point, considering the social polarization it brought, destroying Twitter for good would be an immense service to humanity, and Musk is doing exactly that, even if unwillingly.
I don’t remember who stated this but basically there is this thought that Musk was in fact mad about how on Twitter the “common man” could indeed vocally and effectively share their disagreement with his decisions.<p>It also might have been an impulsive decision to become relevant in “new tech” at the same time (why would he care so much about this, boredom?). Ultimately he probably just wanted to get out of that impulsive deal again though but it was too late.<p>Lastly he probably also had/has some WeChat ambitions.<p>We can see how most of these potential goals are now falling apart spectacularly due to extreme unreflected and unchecked ego.<p>He seems to have succeeded in the first case though, the “moderated”/“mostly sane”(?) free speech “town square” basically destroyed and replaced by an increasingly irrelevant echo chamber for his greater brand.
I'd like to give a little background. This isn't intended in defense of the move, I share the general discomfort with the change<p>X.com, a payments company, was Musk's second company formed in 1999. In March 2000 PayPal was formed by the merger X.com with Thiel and Levchin's Continuity. Musk was the initial CEO, but by September 2000 the board replaced Musk with Thiel while Musk was on vacation to Australia. October 2002, eBay purchased PayPal for US$1.5 billion<p>Musk repurchased the X.com domain from PayPal in 2017<p>In October 2022, Musk said he will execute the X product plan "with some improvements" which will make Twitter "the most valuable financial institution in the world"<p>Other notes:<p>- Musk is a fan of cryptocurrency and Bitcoin<p>- Starlink is an independent internet backbone that can be access from anywhere on earth<p>- Starlink plans to separate from SpaceX and IPO. Funds from the IPO is how SpaceX plans to pay for the Mars project
I initially thought buying twitter was about converting massively overvalued TSLA stock into only somewhat overvalued TWTR stock. I now think I was wrong.
Seems there's a bug:<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/aL0ap8h.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.imgur.com/aL0ap8h.png</a><p>I'm clicking the X but the modal won't go away
Can't wait to X about this and re-X other people's X's too. Maybe I'll sub-X or quote-X a few too.<p>Looking forward also to the news outlets having to talk about famous people and politicians having X'd about a topic on X.
Now that Elon no longer wants the Twitter brand, somebody please steal it, make a new "twitter" clone hosted in Kosovo so they can't take it down (cough) and we all just move there.
The CEO latest tweets is hilarious - never read so much word salad in my life.
It makes that hippy WeWork CEO look like a genius.<p>X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.<p>SoftBank - time to double down !!!!.
So WeChat does this:<p>> text messaging, hold-to-talk voice messaging, broadcast (one-to-many) messaging, video conferencing, video games, mobile payment, sharing of photographs and videos and location sharing.[1]<p>Twitter does public messaging and DMs, but is not a chat platform and doesn't have any of the other features of WeChat.<p>To become a SuperApp, X will need a lot of additional features: X will need enough features to both convince new users to join the platform AND keep them using it for most of their daily needs. That would mean Twitter would need to replace WhatsApp/Signal/Telegram when people want to chat with friends and businesses.<p>That would require <i>a lot</i> of new Twitter users! Twitter is noisy, but quite small for a social media.<p>Based on the track record of Twitter acquisition and subsequent changes, I don't see how Elon is going to massively increase the user base to have enough critical mass to make this happen.<p>Wechat is successful and became a de-facto "everything app" in great part because it's extremely useful to the Chinese government as a way to monitor and control its populace.<p>[1]:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeChat</a>
* Spend 44 billion because of memes<p>* Fire 90% of the workforce<p>* Get clowned on every day on the very platform you own<p>* Lose half of your advertising revenue because you insist on platforming fascists<p>* Destroy any brand recognition you had, including having created a damn verb out of it<p>* Have your puppet CEO spout some vapid shit about your new platform being all about AI<p>* Have your logo be blatant copyright infringement of a well known typeface<p>Eagerly awaiting Paul Graham to tell everyone how Elon is a complete genius and that he puts rockets into space, making a WeChat clone can't be this complicated.<p>Every single one of them, clowns failing upwards
So the 'world's most brilliant entrepreneur' paid 44 billion - about twice as much as its estimated worth at the time, though much less that that now - to own the Twitter brand, only to toss it out within a year. Arguably the one thing that, while damaged, still holds some value. Help me make it make sense.
I usually don't comment on these threads but I think it is the stupidest decision Musk could ever take. Marketing 101,Branding 101, you don't rebrand a (relatively) successful product and confuse both your users and advertisers unless you really want to destroy your product. Because despite all its problems, users were still willing to stay on the platform.<p>Even Zuck knew that after the company rebranded as Meta, Facebook is still Facebook.<p>Well the good thing is that there is room for a replacement, although it's going to be tougher than 15 years ago because the tech and legal landscape has changed and VC are much less inclined to fund social media. Threads had a huge start but it's already shedding users and Bluesky is already ultra partisan.
If only there was a common phrase that could describe this change, hmmmm - perhaps something like:<p>"Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic"
After reading some comments here, this rebranding seems so ridiculous that looks like a joke, honestly.<p>> X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered
> in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking...<p>How do we call videos from X? xvideos?
This is such bad web design its amazing<p>Go to the Twitter.com on mobile in a private browsing window or basically be not logged in. The standard popup will come up asking you to logon.<p>In the top left is a small X you can click to close this popup and continue to twitter without loggin in. In the center top left is the new X logo which is just slightly larger. I immediately clicked on the larger X and of course nothing happened. I then realized it was the smaller but very similar X in the upper left hand corner I needed to click to close the popup.<p>How is the basic design this bad?
I embrace this change! Now I might just stop impulsively clicking on links that report on the Twitter trash fire. Because now it's the X trash fire and whatever is X anyway.<p>I remember when Facebook turned into Meta. Made it much easier to ignore them.
It’s all just so dumb, isn’t it? It isn’t even interesting any more. I can’t exactly say I had high hopes when Musk took over Twitter but I was interested to see where he’d go with it. Now we’re just at the lipstick on a pig stage.
So how do we call tweets now? I nominate "eXcrements".<p>Lately I've been mostly supportive of things Musk was doing with Twitter, but this rebranding thing is just insane. I almost think it's trolling to generate buzz and the name change will be reverted in a few days.
A common saying amongst rich family dynasties is 'The first generation builds the business, the second makes it a success, and the third wrecks it'.<p>Elon seems to be trying hard to break that rule, as he seems to be working to achieve all of this in a single generation.
As a frequent internet user, I must admit that "X" is my go-to symbol when I want to close a browser tab quickly. It's a simple yet effective design that has become almost universally recognized across various web browsers.
Tweeting was like googling, or photoshopping. It demonstrated market lead on a linguistic level.<p>I guess this kind of rebranding must be very appreciated by competing platforms.
When Musk bought Twitter, I had the notion that Musk doesn't care if twitter falls under. I completely underestimated the depth of his indifference. He's going to have twitter be his way totally, and survival won't be a consideration. Twitter stays alive? Great. It fails? Oh well.
Looks like the X11 logo, doesn’t it?<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Window_System</a>
> The company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino tweeted that while Twitter changed the way people conversed with each other, X will go further and will have features “centered in [...] payment/banking”<p>Good luck with that. I was permanently banned from Twitter for reporting Russian terrorist content.<p>If you fancy being locked out of your money for apparently a thought crime, then X (or rather Z) is for you, comrades.
In all this nonsense with the so called Metaverse, the reddit shitshow and now with twitter, keep in mind: Brands are made up and even if a few platform commit suicide, the internet will continue. New things will fill the gaps left. Humans want to communicate and will find ways to do so. The fediverse is already one potential way out and more will surely pop up.
What does the path to success look like for "the everything app"?<p>I can't picture it. So far it looks like they're acting like a FAANG in a "fake it til you make it" move to try to attract money. But not only do they not have the scale, Twitter is also losing its place as the reference app for live text updates.
Mr Praline:<p><pre><code> It is an X-company!
</code></pre>
Owner:<p><pre><code> Well, it's...it's, ah...probably pining for the fjords</code></pre>
Is this really relevant news for HN? I mean, I know we’re talking about a large tech company, but this feels pretty insignificant (just a marketing stunt, we already knew about his plans for Twitter). I feel like any other business doing that would be ignored on HN and rightly so.
I wonder how long will this last, will it be the same as Doge logo?<p>I think Twitter had among the best brands across social media, similar with HBO in entertainment. To use a generic letter instead of all of the goodwill that the brand and accompanying verbs had seems really ridiculous.
For a company that isn’t making the economics work, how does one justify such a massive resource investment in a brand change like this?! Do the gains from the related PR (ie news coverage) make up for it? These are not meant to be rhetorical questions.
He owns Twitter/X and he can name it anything he wants.<p>I had not been using Twitter much before he bought it, and I use Mastodon a bit, but ironically I started using Twitter/X more after he bought it.<p>There are a few things that give me hope for the future: Twitter/X strongly supporting free speech, and the presidential campaigns of Kennedy and Cornel West. I think the corporate-democrats and the corporate-republicans are a sign of a ruined country. Our country is being looted as we watch.<p>That is just my opinion, which is only important to me. I am not trying to tell anyone else how to vote or how to think.
I've been very indifferent to the Elon love/hate stuff and don't really see the point in investing personal opinions on someone I'll never meet. I do have a strong annoyance for this change though.<p>This yet another company is trying to horn in and "claim" stuff that is fundamental to language. A company cannot own a <i>letter</i>, for goodness sake! It bothers me at how much common, everyday stuff that big brands are trying to steal from the lexicon. Meta, Apple, Sky, etc.<p>These are things that <i>belong</i> to the public. They don't exist for the sole purpose of some company to hawk its wares - the word does not exist solely for them to swoop in and claim it for their stupid VR-branded neckties.<p>Use your family name. Make up some goofy nonsense word. Make up a phony sounding "foreign" word if you have to (Starbucks cup sizes, etc.) I'm fine with all of that! Just don't call your company some everyday word like "Dog" or "L" whatever. That's <i>ours</i>.<p>It's not right that companies would take these very basic elements of language. It's cheesy, and lame, and tedious. If I remember correctly, Sony tried something like this with trying to trademark the word "blue" for Bluray. You don't get to own the word <i>blue</i>, for goodness sake! It's aggravating.
Musk's either trying to show everyone how _not_ to approach web product development and engineering, part of some weird accelerationist ploy, or he's simply lost the plot.
Musk and other media attention black holes distract us from more pressing issues, specially these past weeks as we have seen all sort of weather records being broken.
Elon Musk has hit the tipping point I like to call "too big to succeed" (a riff on "too big to fail"). He has successfully failed upwards his entire career and bought into his own hype. This isn't new. He was ousted from Paypal for incompetence.<p>What fooled a lot of people (including me) was SpaceX but it's become clear that SpaceX has succeeded in spite of Elon, not because of him. Someone in the SpaceX leadership has done an exceptional job of insulating SpaceX from Elon's terrible and random micromanagement. Some might say Tesla. I think the jury is still out on Tesla. The business doesn't justify its market cap but irrational hype can last a very long time. Just look at Bitcoin.<p>Eventually these fail-sons make a bet so large it costs them everything. It's why wealth rarely lasts more than a few generations. It's why the wealthiest people in America aren't named Astor, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan or Carnegie. Eventually some fail-son destroyed the fortune their forebears built.<p>Elon wants to turn Twitter into WeChat, basically. An all-encompassing destination and platform. Chat, banking, etc.<p>Elon has done the Mckinsey or Private Equity thing of just raising prices and cutting costs without regard for long-term consequences. His actions have caused a huge drop in advertiser revenue, one that won't be recouped at $8/month. He has to come up with the money to cover interest payments and the Tesla board and shareholders have limited patience for him selling Tesla stock to do it. Should Tesla crater, Elon could well go under.<p>To paraphrase something I saw on Twitter (sorry, "X"), Elon has thrown away a 15 year old household name for a delete button.
Is it just me or does <a href="http://x.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://x.com/</a> redirect to a GoDaddy parking page?
Disappointed by the commentary here. Most commenters are focussed on their view of Musk's personal attributes, and think he was stupid all along, and that he had successes only through luck. Many bizarre comments seem to be able to read his mind and understand his inner motivations too.<p>I'd expect more nuance and less bias from Hacker News contributors.
The bird logo is still showing up in Twitter's HTML icon tags:<p><link rel="shortcut icon" href="//abs.twimg.com/favicons/twitter.2.ico"><p><link rel="mask-icon" sizes="any" href="<a href="https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-svg.168b89da.svg" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-svg.168...</a>" color="#1D9BF0"><p><link rel="apple-touch-icon" sizes="192x192" href="<a href="https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-ios.b1fc727a.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://abs.twimg.com/responsive-web/client-web/icon-ios.b1f...</a>">
"x.com is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com"<p>Wild. I was expecting they'd use the obvious domain name.<p>Does this rename include retaining the original trademarks (name, "twitter blue", etc etc?) - or can someone now clone the site and restore the original functionality?
Ah, the end of an era...<p><a href="http://x.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://x.com</a> used to return a single uncached "x" as a reply. I used it countless times as a quick connectivity test. Alas, simplicity always fades...
Elon Musk is addicted to the messaging app formerly known as Twitter.
Elon Musk seems to believe everyone else is addicted to the same degree.<p>Everything he does with twitter only makes sense to me given the assumption that all users <i>have</i> to stay and they <i>can not</i> possibly leave.<p>How many people are like "I don't want an everything app, I just wanna read silly tweets"? This demographic apparently doesn't exist in his mind.
I feel pity for the developers now
(In el risitas sound)<p>- Quick, we need a new icon<p>- X<p>- Rushing to change all birds svg to x svg<p>- Uhh sir, we broke the layout..<p>- Also, it still says twitter in the text next to it..<p>- No problem, search replace-all twitter to X<p>- uhh sir, the frontend isn’t communicating with backend anymore!!<p>- Uhh I think we broke the site!!
Rebranding makes sense, though how I'd done it was only when the "X app" had enough use cases that many users came to it not from the existing Twitter user pool but from anywhere, like for payments like with WeChat.<p>Rebranding then could just be more complicated though and could kill the potential user rush so in a way this might be the right thing, even though it will look foolish in the case that X.com doesn't take off as hoped and will be easy to make fun of. But I do appreciate the attempt, one can't say it's done due to a lack of courage.
It was certainly worth making your employees work over the weekend to do a half-assed rebrand for no reason, now the site is full of "interim" X logos and text referring to twitter. Pointless and stupid.
Via Ukraine war footage I learned that "getting off the X" is an established military idiom (for leaving a dialed-in target area of e.g. artillery). Now it might find a newer even more popular meaning.
So I am removing all the obsolete bird icons (with links) from my site...<p>Not that Elon will exactly be quaking in his boots, but the search engines will notice me and others doing the same. Death by a billion hyperlink cuts!
How is Alphabet going to take this, considering their “moonshot factory” is also called X (<a href="https://x.company/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://x.company/</a>)?
An earlier thread on why an everything app is bad for liberal democracy.<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33151774">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33151774</a>
Perhaps subscribers get to call it XX, or even XXX?<p>Rebranding requires careful thought and planning and even then is often unsuccessful. This name change hasn't even been given a second's thought.
$44 billion so he can <i>finally</i> call something "X" without any grownups in the room to tell him why it's a terrible idea. Well, I guess we all have our hobbies.
First thing that came to my mind was this:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/hS57I6swXcc?t=59s" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://youtu.be/hS57I6swXcc?t=59s</a><p>More seriously, at least it's not an unforeseen step. Musk actually mentioned his longtime plan shortly after the acquisition: <a href="https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-elon-musks-x-the-everything-app/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-is-elon-musks-x-the-every...</a>
I'm tired of tech blogs stroking musk every time he sneezes. The billionaire worship is exhausting.<p>He's also a classless egomaniac xenophobe who never had a tough day in his life.
I absolutely don't care about what's going on at Twitter, but, wow, the current owner like to spend very little time between announcing and shipping features!
I can't believe how salty HN is about CEOs like Musk or Jobs. This sounds like people making fun on the iPad. Let's watch what happens over 6 months and see.
The collective sentiment is that using "X" will make searching and referencing the platform and actions in the platform more challenging. "Did you 'X' it?"<p>Someone in the branding team will make a juvenile tag line of "X marks the spot" and ironically it might catch on for the sake of people calling the platform "the spot". "Did you find 'the spot' for it?"
Does Musk have the same PR people as Kanye West? Being publicly crazy seems a really odd choice and, if it works, quite worrying for the future of humanity.
I wonder if this is because of Musk's fixation on him owning x.com since he was a young man.<p>Twitter by itself is a valuable brand, why ditch it for a letter which he embeds in apocalyptical darkness?<p>And regarding the logo, would it give him OCD if he realized that he could have elongated one side of the stick into the center of the area in order for it to also symbol a line crossing a plane?
Exactly how inept do you have to be before the shareholders can successfully sue you for blowing up a company? Musk isn't a slope-browed incompetent; why is he acting this way? I knew when he bought it his stated intentions were probably going to cost the company money long-term but it's like he's intentionally trying to burn it to the ground.
Some fun takes from non-techies. Nobody's into this: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/158ery9/elon_musk_is_renaming_twitter_one_of_the_most/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.reddit.com/r/redscarepod/comments/158ery9/elon_m...</a>
I'm really, really interested in the way Elon's psyche works. He was touted as an IT gargantuan for so long, but to me (and this is only my opinion) he just seems... fairly... simple-minded. Some of his more brazen actions, such as this one just reinforce my opinion.
To me, even if my Linux now use Wayland, X is my Linux graphic interface. I created a rasterizer for Xserver, but i'm sure anybody who has worked on Linux GUI, mouse, tiling or even keyboard event will be the same. Like how at work they called a project group 'GCC'. This perturb me.
The logo is interim, so we should expect a re-design in the near future.<p>No any other assets have changed, which means the logo change was mainly to highlight on the vision. I actually appreciate the sloppiness. Twitter is now like a dorm startup. Change the logo? Sure, <img src="new_logo.png"...>
Hey everyone, I’m having a genius business idea. Let’s create ambiguity around everything we do by just calling it all “x”. That way, nobody will know wtf we’re talking about half the time. SpaceX? X.ai? X.com? The shit I took earlier while forming this idea?
Here is the thread we should continually reëxamine: <a href="https://x.com/mattschnuck/status/1590732559029194752" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://x.com/mattschnuck/status/1590732559029194752</a>
It’s as if this man child is on a personal vendetta to destroy and deform Twitter after they “made him” follow through with the purchase of Twitter.<p>This, together with the Reddit debacle and the whole Threads privacy thing really puts a spin on social.<p>What a time to be alive.
I'm no branding expert but this sounds like a bad idea, yet given Musk's whimsical decisions, I'm not entirely sure he's serious about it rather than trying to reap the benefits of keeping Twitter in the news.
I’m annoyed that this will be the bridge too far that killed a useful service, even though it was never one I checked daily. If I’d have known 6 months ago I would have accepted the offer to sell my twitter handle for $400.
There is already a bug report for this: <a href="https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1876">https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm/issues/1876</a>
It's wild how much emotion and turmoil freaking twitter changing their freaking logo causes for people. An article about the DEA trying to end end-to-end encryption has one quarter the comments.
Or you can spin up your amateur, brittle fediverse instances, pay out of pocket for electricity/internet, and devote to volunteer system administration.<p>No where to run wokists, the Xtermination has begun!
I do wonder how much work will go into changing the logo on all the websites that have twitter buttons. The number of WordPress blogs that are now being updated.<p>All because of the whim of one person.
So, is it just the logo? Or will the whole platform renamed to Twitter X, Twi-x or something like that? I mean he already has Space X, maybe he will now line them up for the giggles?
Elon thinks X represents a variable. So a "super app" that will do anything.<p>I think X represents closing a dialog/window or deleting things.<p>We'll see which one is more apt in the near future.
When I was a child, I went to grade school. My classmates engaged in dramatic actions to attract attention. They have since matured. In contrast, Musk evidently has not.
Is this similar to when Google and Facebook renamed to Alphabet and Meta respectively and then rebalanced the former applications under the latter like a red-black tree?
And now I start counting down for someone to point out how this particular logo has already been trademarked.<p>It's a bit similar to the X Window System. Who owns that these days?
What is the meaning of x, I mean all possible meanings? Why it seems that "x" is a favourite letter in an alphabet when some things need to be named.
X is Elons equivalent of "Fetch".<p>He's obsessed with making it "a thing", but he's forgotten "Fetch will never be a thing"....
Lol x.com is blocked from Indonesia, probably one of the largest Twitter users.<p>Probably the website was used for pr0n, or the dev who made the blocking rule use a wrong regex.
On the one hand, Musk was always obsessed with X, so the change may be organic.<p>On the other hand, a name change together with new product announcements is standard for American CEOs if they don't know what to do and have to show to their investors that they are doing something. I believe Musk has a number of Saudi investors.<p>Let's see what he does. If he goes into streaming like with Tucker Carlson the renaming may be appropriate. Perhaps he'll buy Fox News, who knows.<p>I have little hopes for the payment processor. I've avoided PayPal and I sure will avoid this one.
'Tweet' is a word pronounced pretty good in many european languages. 'X' does not.<p>I don't find this a smart move for such a big brand.
Interesting thread today. I see lots of haters here in the comments.<p>While you all very well may be right about his future failure with Twitter, I think it’s important to highlight that Musk is very different from most people in that he looks like he’s failing until he succeeds, and he’s done that with just about every company he’s run.<p>Twitter make look like a dumpster fire now, but based on past history, I’m betting he’s going to make a ton of money here (but it won’t happen over night).
its tiresome that non-technical folk treat musks ideas as novel, but anyone familiar knows that Snapchat, IG, wechat and others are already well along the paths of "everything apps". Sorta interested to see how twitter can compete, being so far behind capability wise.
twitters brand is valuable. the only logical explanation is that musk thinks he will get something even more valuable in return for axing the brand. the strength of the brand is exactly why it needs to go. twitters brand is too strong for an identity change into an app that does all kinds of content, banking, identity, etc. the set of services that is offered online is emerging from the primordial soup of the early 2000s and gaining a definitive shape — the wave of the future is all platforms offering the same services on dedicated apps instead of the internet being a hodgepodge of scattered javascript apps. if x can be the first foot in the door of a paradigm change like that, ditching the bird will be an excellent decision. i think the long established pattern of people laughing at musk and then promptly copying him will hold true here.
Musk will do what Musk does, whether or not he will be successful time will tell. But he has proven track record and he has made me a lot of money historically. To all you cringe haters, use your valuable energy else where rather than trashing others online.
It feels like that all Musk wanted was to destroy twitter.<p>I really don't understand why Twitter really wanted to sell it to Musk. It always felt like a bad idea.<p>I understand that it was probably a matter of money and law or whatever, but I wonder how the former twitter execs are feeling about all this now.<p>I never really used twitter, to be clear, but to sell anything to somebody who clearly seems unfit for it because he just made an arrogant, seems quite like a bad decision. I wonder if they regret it.<p>Although there is one benefit in this story: it shows that Elon Musk is a clown, and as he initially did not want to buy Twitter, it seems like he is taking revenge by destroying it, which is an even better proof. Capitalism is really really awful. This story is a good example why capitalism often doesn't work.
Hey uh, why not pay top-tier talent to build a more modern platform from scratch, starting with zero technical debt, and then when it's ready, merge in the Twitter userbase, and sunset it?<p>It's because he's a fucking moron.
I don’t really see what Musk is trying to accomplish.<p>Everything he’s done to Twitter carries the foul stench of Death by Private Equity. No product improvements, but worse reliability, more spam, and a weird desperate-looking rebrand. This is what it looks like when inept MBAs try to squeeze some more life out of a dying platform.<p>The strange thing here is that Musk’s acquisition was supposed to be the exact opposite. He’s not beholden to private equity masters. He’s supposed to be a product genius. He was supposed to bankroll exciting new ventures. Instead it’s kind of like MySpace meets SourceForge.
The world of "tech" seems to be spiralling into a realm of absurd metaverses, the dark obsessions of a tiny gang of annointed leaders, a house of cards, lies built upon lies, increasingly desperate hypes.<p>The whole thing detached from the deteriorating human reality, a pervasive lack of empathy for our condition.<p>Not clear how we could / should respond to this grand fiasco. Somehow tech needs to be reinvented. Much more grassroots, more authentic, more focused on real problem solving.
The writing has been on the walls for a while now. Musk has officially killed Twitter. It has basically turned into an anti LGBTQ and right wing circle jerk. Majority of users have already migrated elsewhere. At least we can give him credit for not hiding it anymore.
I think Elon Musk is planning to expand the features of Twitter and transform this social network in something bigger and not entirely correlated with we know as Twitter right now. We should expect some big announcements after this name change.
For some reason this finally gave me the motivation to delete my account. Not the outages or endorsing fascists or giving Tucker Carlson media deals or removing features behind paywalls or making reach pay-to-win or...
I'm extremely excited to see if Elon Musk can actually pull off driving twitter into the ground to the point where his entire purchase becomes an utter waste of money.
this is worth a listen re: elon musk, technocracy and "X"
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAddtaCFKYg">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAddtaCFKYg</a>
This man is burning anything that had any value at Twitter. From an extremely valuable list of verified users to the name which is even used as a verb.<p>There is absolutely no reason to rename Twitter. The name isn't even that stained compared to like Comcast or what ever the name was of that phone company in the 90s that sucked so bad it was renamed.
In my opinion the healthiest approach is to not care. Life’s too short.<p>Almost everything else is more important than some rich brain parasite’s midlife crisis dressed up as 5-d chess. The brain parasite feeds on attention whether positive or negative.
It seems like Elon Musk has a vision of creating a platform business model that encompasses all his business endeavors and more.<p>I don’t like Twitter, nor do I like Elon Musk, but it seems clear to me that he has a strategic plan. I doubt he gives two shits about what Twitter is or was - when he bought Twitter he acquired a lot of talent, and a place to start to launch his platform - of which he envisions the world being beholden to, and he will be the king of that castle.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he will have some kind of X crypto, X digital wallets, X online shops, he’ll probably even have his own X-onion sites too, for all the people who want his X branded LSD and MDMA.
Why not? I've found I've been using Twitter more ever since Elon bought it. He's made some good improvements. It's popular to hate Elon but I think he's trying to make Twitter better than he found it.
Has anything Elon-doomers have said with regard to Twitter ever materialized? I still remember when people were <i>sure</i> it’d blow up if it didn’t have a constant supply of thousands of engineers doing… “stuff”. Are y’all really that naïve about how little most people in tech actually do?<p>Similarly here, are y’all really that naïve to think the branding matters at all compared to the user base?
Very interesting no one had an issue with twitter when they were mass censoring (even the sitting president of the united states!), got hacked by a 17 year old to have all types of celebrities and politicians tweet a bitcoin scam, were chock full of scam bots, etc.<p>Twitter today is freer and on the path towards improvement, much like the original twitter. Who remembers the Iran revolution and the "stop or i'll tweet" motto?