Reinventing Twitter

Twitter, as we know it, is coming to an end. They recently announced a total rebranding to what we’ll know as x.com from now on. It’s an interesting decision coming from Elon Musk, who intends to turn Twitter into some sort of «everything app».

It’s easy to dismiss anything Elon Musk does as folly, but the truth is that it doesn’t matter how much you dislike the guy: he’s one of the greatest achievers of our time. He’s been at front of several of the greatest companies of our time, and no amount of luck could make a fool accomplish all that.

I think it’s clear that Elon Musk has a very specific vision of what he wants Twitter to become, and it’s something that appears hard to visualize for everyone else.

All the apocalyptic predictions coming from his detractors have turned to be wrong. Twitter was supposed to implode technologically following the layoff of several thousand employees. Advertisers were expected to abandon the platform in droves, and users were supposed to flock to other platforms like Mastodon or Threads. By now, Twitter should be a desertic wasteland.

But the truth is that, 10 months into Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, none of that, except for a couple brief moments of panic after some big change.

On the other hand, Twitter’s rebranding has turned out to be somewhat… rustic. Personally, I would’ve never anticipated such a sloppy transition: if this isn’t Twitter anymore, how do we call tweets and retweets? What’s the logo like? What’s their website domain?

They merely swapped their website logo to the one proposed by the first commenter in Musk’s post announcing the brand change, and then redirected x.com to twitter.com. So the site is still full of references to twitter, tweets, and birds.

In the process, they effectively obliterated one of the most iconic and enduring brands on the internet. Twitter has been with us for the last 17 years, few brands on the internet are so resilient, and now it’s just vanished.

Musk could have planned a smoother transition. Lots of people are going to have a bad time understanding that Twitter doesn’t exist anymore, and that they are now supposed to refer to it as just X.

Despite this, I’m looking forward to see what X becomes. Truth is they still have the userbase and the reputation. It’s pretty amusing to see how Musk’s detractors like to rant about how Twitter’s doom… on Twitter itself. There’s clearly some sort of friction that makes it hard to find somewhere else to talk about it.