Rest in peace, Twitter. You’ve been officially replaced by X!
Tech :
Apparently, Elon Musk (who purchased Twitter last year for a whopping $44 billion) has too much time and too much money on his hands. Or, in other words, he’s bored. That can be the only explanation for why Musk abruptly decided over the weekend to kill off the name ‘Twitter’ and rebrand it as simply ‘X.’
Yes, Twitter is now officially dead. The term “tweet” is no more. The blue bird icon has been buried. Thanks to Musk, everything in the former TwitterWorld has been renamed and rebranded with the single letter X.
On Tuesday, Musk even hired a crane and workers to take the name Twitter off the building headquarters in San Francisco so that it could be replaced with X (although police stopped workers halfway through their task once they discovered Musk never obtained a permit to block the streets with a crane).
For now, the web address twitter.com still works. However, Musk has already changed that too — and the new web address is x.com (which is already fully functional and working). His reasoning: he thinks it’s “cool” and he has this vision for X to miraculously become an “everything app” where users can go to do banking, investing, shopping, posting, and more.
However, there are already a few problems with X.
Number 1, users hate it. No, they actually despise it. Many say the name sounds like a porn site.
Number 2, the brand of Twitter and the term “tweet” is so indelibly etched into our brains that no one will probably ever call the site X (sort of the way everyone says “Kleenex” instead of tissues).
And, number 3, Musk may have just set himself up for multiple trademark infringement lawsuits.
Too bad for Elon, but both Meta (the new parent company of Facebook) and Microsoft each own trademarks involving the use of “X” as a brand. And, they’re not the only ones.
“There’s a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben. He added that he has already counted nearly 900 active US trademark registrations that cover the letter X in a wide range of industries.
Swapping Twitter’s blue bird logo for the letter X has confused users, with some saying the new branding is more akin to a pornography site than a social-media platform https://t.co/PoTddywsGI
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) July 26, 2023
Still, that didn’t stop the impromptu Elon Musk, who proceeded full speed ahead with the X rebranding without even telling the company’s own CEO.
When Musk purchased Twitter, he also chose to become its CEO. However, after months of foibles and fumbles on his part (and a 50% drop in ad revenue), Musk conceded he was well in over his head and promised to hire a qualified CEO so that he could step away from operations.
We now see that promise didn’t age well.
After being blindsided by the weekend whims of her boss, new CEO Linda Yaccarino was forced to issue a statement and act as if she not only knew about the rebranding in advance but was deeply in support of the change.
“For years, fans and critics alike have pushed Twitter to dream bigger, to innovate faster, and to fulfill our great potential,” Yaccarino wrote. “There’s absolutely no limit to this transformation,” she continued. “X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything.”
Yeah, right.
This whacky attempt to remake Twitter as X is about as smart as the time Netflix attempted to rebrand itself as Qwikster and HBO renamed itself Max.
And, we all know how those turned out…
OK WASSUP! discusses Tech News:
Twitter is now X.
Elon Musk got lucky with Tesla. But he is like Trump. Everything he touch turns to a disaster. Twitter was fine until Musk stuck himself in it. If he already lost 50 percent ad revenue and people hate this new name, that company is heading to bankruptcy.