Remember when Elon Musk said that he wants to turn Twitter into an everything platform and rebrand it? Well, this just happened as Musk announced that Twitter would become X.
The company’s logo will now show a white X on a black background instead of the iconic blue bird. The changes have only been implemented on the Desktop version, though.
Twitter.com will become X.com, and the “Tweets” will be replaced with “X’s“. The new app is supposed to incorporate everything from financial services to social interactions, gaming, and so on.
Already, the Twitter logo has been taken down from the Twitter HQ in San Francisco, and the company name has been officially changed to X Corp.
He said that this “should have been done a long time ago.” Linda Yaccarino, the new CEO, approved of this change and said that the rebranding would change the way communication is done.
She said that “Twitter made one massive impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go further, transforming the town square.“
Some people have begun mourning the Blue Bird, including Martin Grasser, the original designer of the logo – “Today we say goodbye to this great blue bird.“
Jack Dorsey retweeted (or rex’ed) the same message and added a goat emoji, which would signify that the Blue Bird logo is the great of all time.
Why X?
It’s not a secret that Elon Musk loves the letter X. Here are a few notable examples of this:
- X.com was one of his first business ventures, an online banking platform built in 1999
- SpaceX has an X in the name
- Musk named his first child Grimes X Æ A-12 Musk
- He recently launched an AI start-up called xAI
And now Twitter will be rebranded as X. Musk already owns the X.com domain name, which now leads back to the Twitter platform.
Based on Musk’s claims, freshly-rebranded Twitter will be a “super app” like India’s PayTM or Indonesia’s GoJek.
WeChat is another great example of a social media platform that does more than just connect people from around the world?
Drew Benvie, a social media commentator and the founder of the digital agency Battenhall, said that “Musk is going full throttle for the everything app space, leaving old Twitter in his wake, and eyeing the successes of Asia’s trailblazers like WeChat and Moj. Succeeding in just a couple of additional services, like shopping or payments, could be all that’s needed to make X better than Twitter was. But there are already so many alternatives, so Musk and co are playing an enormous game of catch-up.“
According to various experts, this is a bold and risky move. Not just because of Musk’s aspirations for the platform but also because it will estrange Twitter’s user base.
The platform’s old users might not like the change and could stop using the platform if it turns into something they’re unfamiliar with.
There’s one more risk attached to the rebranding, as Jake Moore, a global cyber adviser at security firm ESET, says: “A rebrand is the perfect opportunity to send phishing emails requesting users to sign in via a new URL from a link within that email – but of course that link wouldn’t be genuine and that’s where people could be tricked into handling their genuine Twitter credentials without their usual level of caution.”
We’ll see if Musk’s gamble pays off or if Twitter goes under!
