What does the change from Twitter to X mean and how does it affect users?
The Twitter we knew no longer exists. This Monday, Elon Musk announced the radical rebranding of the company he acquired in October 2022: the logo of the iconic little blue bird ceases to exist and the name of the social network is now X.
Just like that, the company that was born in 2006 and became one of the largest digital public squares in the world is now part of technological history.
An important point: the social network is not going away. If we look at the big picture superficially, the basic functions of Twitter continue to work and the only thing that seems to have changed is the logo and the name of the network.
However, although the social network will continue, some experts (and even Musk himself) have pointed out that the rebranding points to Musk’s plan to create a new ‘all-in-one’ ecosystem within X and, at the same time, leave behind the name of a company that has been on the verge of bankruptcy, as the controversial entrepreneur has repeatedly assured.
Why Twitter Change to X?
Since last year, Musk had already given signs of what was to be the future of Twitter.
In June 2022, before he acquired the company in October, Musk told Twitter employees that the platform should be more like the Chinese app WeChat, which he said users “basically live on” the app because “it’s very useful and practical for daily life.”
Meanwhile, after acquiring Twitter in October, Musk presented his vision of an “everything” app called X, where users could communicate, shop, consume entertainment and more.
All indications are that this is the main reason for Twitter’s rebranding to X, as the company’s new CEO emphasized that very point.
Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal marketing executive who began working as CEO of Twitter (now X) on June 5, told employees in a memo Monday that X “will go even further to transform the global public square.”
The company will work on new audio, video, messaging, payments and banking features, according to the memo, which was seen by Reuters.
Niklas Myhr, a professor of marketing at Chapman University, told Reuters that the switch to X appears to be an indication that Musk gave up on any plans “to revive Twitter as a powerful standalone social network and simply considers the US$44 billion spent on the network to be an unrecoverable cost.”
Likewise, Drew Benvie, CEO of social networking consultancy Battenhall, also commented to Reuters that the change to X is not so much aimed at reinventing Twitter, but more “at building a brand around Elon Musk’s empire, including SpaceX, where the X brand really connects a little more closely.”
How does it affect users?
As mentioned above, little changes for users…at least up to this point.
Perhaps the most immediate change is the replacement of the blue bird logo with a black outlined X on a white background and that you can now access the social network by entering the x.com website. Doing that, however, redirects you to the familiar twitter.com domain. No word on whether that will change in the future, but that fact alone already marks a new address.
Also, as Musk himself said, tweets will now be called x’s (‘exes’, if we pronounce it in Spanish).
Beyond that, there is no other change that directly affects users. What there is in X since Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022 is uncertainty about the operation of the social network, which would translate as the biggest impact users have had since then.
The social network has had massive layoffs, disputes over millions of dollars allegedly owed in severance pay, warnings of grueling workdays, huge revenue losses following the departure of advertisers, limits on the number of tweets that can be viewed daily and, above all, service crashes.
How long will it take to restore the confidence of users and advertisers? Nobody knows exactly, but mathematically speaking, we can safely say that it will take X days.