Elon Musk Rebrands Twitter to X
At The New York Times, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu write:
The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and started replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin alphabet. Inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while conference rooms were renamed to words with X in them, including “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to photos seen by The New York Times.
I’m adding this senseless and inexplicable rebranding to my increasingly long list of reasons to ignore Twitter as much as possible. Is the company X but the service Twitter, like Meta and Facebook? Or is it all X? What word replaces “tweet”?
To my mind, the most apropos combination of the letter X and a bird comes from Monty Python.
It’s not pining, it’s passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot. 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 rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. This is an ex-parrot.
At least Apple renamed the Mac’s operating system to macOS a few years back, so we don’t have to worry about leakage surrounding Mac OS X. But it’s amusing that Meta owns a stylized X trademark for social networking (among much else), having acquired it from Microsoft in 2020.
Apparently, tweets will now be called x’s. Sure, that’s going to catch on.
“X Japan” is registered trademark of a Japanese rock band (1982-1997 and 2007-present.)
http://www.xjapan.com says “X Japan is the most successful rock group in Japanese history.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Japan
I’m having a good chuckle with how Musk is touting this logo as some original idea behind which are lots of grand thoughts of his. I see it and immediately recognize it’s just a rehash of the same symbol used for 3+ decades already for the X Window System. Musk was barely out of grade school when they came up with it. What a poser.
I just saw this headline from the Onion.
It’s better than that. It’s essentially an unmodified capital X from Monotype’s “Special Alphabets 4”.
https://catalog.monotype.com/family/monotype/special-alphabets
(Note: Link is refusing to load for me tonight, probably due to increased traffic from the revelation about the font being the source of the new logo.)
It’s also been in use since December 2021 by an EDM artist named Kxlider, though this artist has an extremely small following.
https://wegotthiscovered.com/social-media/elon-musks-new-twitter-logo-alienates-users-and-walks-straight-into-a-potential-copyright-infringement-lawsuit/
In either case, the new logo is essentially untrademarkable, just as the name is essentially unsearchable.
This all is perfectly in fitting with Musk’s compulsive habit of jumping in headfirst without checking that there’s more than a few inches of water in the pool. He’s 100% id. He gets an idea, he must follow it wherever it leads, no hesitation, no regrets, and no apologies.
Musk is actually transitioning Twitter into a new “Payment” scam. Nothing about his using investors money to buy Twitter is “new”. He’s had visions of a more elaborate PAYPAL for a very long time.
Musk got hold of Twitter to get an instant database of users for his “DIGITAL CURRENCY” SCAM.
Look at the old pictures and videos of Musk and realize the present Musk isn’t actually the REAL Musk.
It’s all yet another scam run by just another corrupt billionaire who sees an easy way to add billions to his bank account.
This has nothing to do with “helping” anyone but himself.
A scam long in the making…
The logo is actually the Unicode character 𝕏, which can be found at U+1D54F in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D400.pdf.
Presumably XXX is the next idea coming down the pipelines. Strictly for adults.
Too good!
And I love the fact that they slipped in the real change from “HBO Max” to “Max”.
Thanks for the reference. This, in math, is known as a “double-struck” character, and is written this way because the letters are written with doubled strokes on a blackboard, where boldface would be impossible.
They are generally used to represent sets ( Doublestruck -- from Wolfram MathWorld ), and many commonly-used sets and classes-of-sets are represented with double-struck letters.
A double-struck X (ð) isn’t one of the standard sets listed on the MathWorld site.
I wonder if the intent here is for it to mean “the set of …” representing the complete set of tweets/texts/videos managed by the service. If so, I like it, but only mathematicians will get it.
Literally everything this new owner has done with Twitter makes no sense. Does he even realize how he is driving people away and / or turning them off?!!!
So MacOS X is OS Ten, so Twitter is now 𝕏 or Ten. /s
Contrary opinion here.
I hope he succeeds and, if the facts as presented are correct, he’s been so far.
Let’s see what happens in the next two years.
Is Musk trying to be avoid being called a Twit? Or revealing himself as one?
I guess most people have a different understanding of the definition of “succeed” – as NOTHING Musk has done with Twitter has been a success by any measure.
He’s not just driving consumers away; he’s been hemorrhaging advertisers. And ads was, and still are, by far, the biggest source of Twitter’s revenue:
I doubt that axing the cute little birdy logo with a humongous, scary looking X is NOT a good choice. Does he really think that he can go up against Google, We Chat/Alibaba, Apple, etc.?
Will Zuckerberg counter with “Faecesbook”?
Twitter/X is bleeding money like it’s been stabbed in the heart. Advertisers are dropping out faster than Musk can persuade them to stay or replace them. Traffic is down in every sector except the loudmouths and scammers and spammers. Legitimate news sources are going silent as they switch to other avenues. They don’t even have enough money to pay their outstanding Google bills for network service, which is the real reason behind the sudden limitation in how many tweets a user can view per day. I haven’t seen a single positive reaction to the rebranding, and some analysts estimate that it’s destroyed as much as $20 billion of the company’s value, given that the brand has long been one of their most valuable assets.
Nothing Musk has done since at Twitter since he took over has succeeded—not a single thing. Where are you getting “facts as presented” indicating otherwise?
I said, “contrary opinion here”. It is just friendly conversation we’re making …
The company is not listed anymore. So no verifiable data is available about revenues, number of paying corporate clients, financials, etc.
All there is are “claims”, by the owner himself, and by his opponents (enemies?).
The owner claims that cashflow is still negative, and that some “lagging indicators” are improving, like “app performance”, number of minutes people are spending on the app daily, etc.
“If we have data, let’s look at data, if all we have are opinions, …”. Jim Barksdale
I don’t have data. Anyone?
https://www.financialexpress.com/business/brandwagon-twitters-global-ad-revenue-declines-by-28-to-2-98-billion-in-2023-from-414-billion-in-2022-insider-intelligence-3046746/
If Twitter wants to sell advertising of any shape, size or form, they MUST consistently publish ad revenue and demographic third party statistics from respected sources regularly, at least on a quarterly basis. And these are just a very few of many respected sources ad buyers use to determine what, where and how they want to invest their bucks. And the current numbers reveal that although Twitter was profitable when Musk purchased it, the are not anything even resembling profitable now.
A big % of former Twitter advertisers continue to head away from it to the advertising hills like wildfire. The few that remain and those that might have been considering buying ads are twisting Twitter’s cyber necks.
And those that remain are twisting Twitter’s neck, arms and legs on pricing.
Here’s how Apple’s ad revenue is doing, and ad revenue is an almost invisible part of their revenue stream.
And Apple recently entered the sports market, and they are finally getting more than a little toe in ad sales:
Well, I kinda stopped caring a while ago in the wake of the “Musk Takeover”.
Although even before that I started to have some reservations.
But shortly after Musk took over I deleted my Twitter account.
Do I fell any less informed?
Nope! I get my information from other - dare I say more valid - sources.
And my own views? Well, I’ve leaned to post those on more item specific media - just to keep the clutter down.
Just my personal opnion.
Here’s another aspect of the “rebranding” effort to X. This story provides a neat example of how “legal” and “legitimate” mean two different things:
I saw this recounting on twitter/X. I don’t know how true it is, but it sounds quite plausible.
https://twitter.com/garius/status/1683808576328937472?s=20
At the end he links to what appears to be the fleshed out retelling.
https://every.to/p/twitter-s-future-is-a-return-to-elon-musk-s-past
Twitter Sues Nonprofit That Tracks Hate Speech:
And here is what Musk thinks about Apple recently nixing its advertising in Twitter because of the amount of hate speech, falsified information, etc.
And today’s news:
Twitter Can’t Seem to Buck Its Advertisers-Don’t-Want-to-Be-Seen-Next-to-Nazis Problem | Vanity Fair.
Hmmm, Twitter messages were called “tweets”, so does that mean X messages will be called “x-its”?
Maybe just call them ‘shits’.
Well, yes, but I was thinking of saying “they were x-iting instead of tweeting”.
Twitter’s recent ad and editorial challenges are now boosting their biggest revenue stream:
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/4198325-x-didnt-take-action-on-86-percent-of-hate-speech-posts-report/