The process was quick. Elon Musk announced early Sunday morning that we would be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand “soon”. This would become X, the do-it-yourself platform the tycoon dreamed of. As early as this Monday morning Spanish time, the new logo with the cross presides over the social network. The site with the new name X.com was supposed to redirect to Twitter early Monday. However, for several hours, many users saw a page from GoDaddy, a domain sales service that advertises ads for armchairs and sofas in addition to the name auction.
The speed and lack of foresight of the process is reflected in the fact that only the logo has changed for the time being. The name “Twitter” remains on the login or search pages. Elon Musk was the first to add the new logo to his account. The black background indicates that it will be the new corporate color. The X was also projected onto Twitter’s main building in San Francisco. Along with cryptic messages from Musk, who has been tweeting non-stop throughout Monday morning about his new name, the company’s new CEO, Linda Yaccarino, gave a hint more of the change
Musk’s intention is to transform the old Twitter into a platform that allows for much more than just short messages: payments and private messages are the most important. “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity, focused on audio, video, messaging, payment/banking, creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities. AI powered [inteligencia artificial]”X will connect us all in ways we are only just beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino wrote in his message. Musk continued to respond with jokes and ebullience to messages in which he laughed at the change or stressed that it made no sense. With Musk, as with other times, it’s difficult to know how everything was intended and what the actual impact the change will have. Musk has promised other changes in the past but hasn’t delivered on them, such as voting on Twitter innovations or creating an outside panel to advise on content moderation.
Both the new name and the intention to make Twitter a super app are old dreams of Musk. He had the idea for the name back in the 20th century when he named his payment startup X.com, which was eventually swallowed up by PayPal. And ever since Musk bought back the domain from Paypal in 2017, he’s apparently had intentions of creating something by that name. Even before buying Twitter, his vision was to transform a platform that already had hundreds of millions of users into more than just a short news site. The success of China’s WeChat, which enables private and public payments and messaging, has been one of Musk’s benchmarks. It’s hard to gauge whether the platform’s changes and instability since Musk’s acquisition will make it easier for its users to trust it with payments and other types of exchanges, but that’s your bet. Of course, it’s far from clear how and when all of these changes will come into effect.
This change affects the app’s logo and official name, although Musk had already changed the company’s name to X. The logo appears to have been adopted from Unicode, a global standard that makes word processing easier, for example making it easier to tweet the new logo, but likely makes it more difficult to establish clear copyright. The tycoon also announced the name change in an internal email to its employees on Sunday, according to an American journalist in Threads, the recently created meta-app meant to compete with Twitter that may have hastened Musk’s intentions.
The problem of changing the name to something so generic is not trivial. How many of your users will then say, “I saw it on X” instead of on Twitter? What are the names of the tweets, tweets and retweets? Musk pretends that they are called “x”, which would be pronounced “equis” in Spanish, like the letter itself. How many people wouldn’t be thrilled to have an account with thousands of followers on X, a name traditionally associated with pornography? This Monday, “Xvideos” was one of the top trends on Twitter. It’s easy to imagine the confusion that arises when someone googles an old tweet and has to associate an “X” with any sentence. Musk likely finds all of these challenges insignificant and fun, but his personal struggle has already begun. against users to make them digest the change.
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