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the X It started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, but the bird was still dominant via the smartphone app. Meanwhile, workers at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters were seen removing the iconic bird and logo on Monday until police showed up and stopped them because they didn’t have the proper permits and weren’t pinned to the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe in case anything fell.
As of early afternoon, the letter “er” appears at the end of the letter Twitter remained visible.
The haphazard erasure of both the physical and virtual remnants of Twitter’s past was in many ways typical of the chaotic way Musk has run the company since his reluctant buyout.
“It’s the end of an era, and a clear sign that Twitter for the past 17 years is gone and won’t come back,” said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence. “But the write-up was outstanding: Musk has been upfront about switching Twitter to Platform X since the beginning, and Twitter really was a shell of its former self.”
It’s another change Musk has made since acquiring Twitter that has quarantined users and turned off advertisers, leaving the microblogging site vulnerable to new threats, including competitor The new text-based Meta app directly targeting Twitter users.
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Musk asked fans for ideas for a logo and chose one, which he described as minimalist art deco, saying “it will definitely be improved”. He replaced his Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted an image of the design displayed on Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco.
“And soon we will be introducing the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk wrote in a tweet on Sunday.
Musk said the X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com.
“I can’t say I’m surprised, but I think it’s a very selfish decision,” said Hannah Thoreson of Baltimore, Maryland, who has used Twitter since 2009 for work and personal posts.
She said, “There are a lot of small businesses, a lot of nonprofits, a lot of government agencies and things like that all over the world that have relied on Twitter for many years to get their message out and reach people. And they all have the Twitter icon on everything from their website to their business cards.”
It costs time and money to change all of this, not to mention the confusion that comes with a previously unknown brand name, she added.
“I mean, would you want to get rid of the Coca-Cola brand if you were Coca-Cola? Why would you do that?” said Thoreson, who now mainly uses Mastodon.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla, has long been fascinated by the letter X and has already renamed Twitter’s corporate name to X Corp. After he bought it in Oct. In response to questions about the tweets that will be named when the rebrand is made, Musk said they will be called Xs.
The billionaire is also the CEO of the rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp, better known as SpaceX. He founded an artificial intelligence company this month called xAI to compete with ChatGPT. In 1999, he founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.
In addition, he calls one of his children, his mother, singer Grimes, “X”. The baby’s actual name is a combination of letters and symbols.
Musk’s purchase and rebranding of Twitter is part of his strategy to create what he calls an “everything app” similar to China’s WeChat app, which combines video chats, messaging, live broadcasts and payments. Musk has made a number of drastic changes since taking over Twitter, including a shift to focus on paid subscriptions, but he doesn’t always follow through with his attention-grabbing new political statements.
Linda Iaccarino, longtime NBC Universal CEO to be CEO of Twitter in May, publicized the new logo and considered the change, writing on Twitter that X would be “the future state of unlimited interaction – centered around voice, video, messaging, and payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
But advertising industry analysts were less certain about the X’s prospects.
“The rebranding will likely be celebrated by Musk’s supporters, but it’s a dreary day for many Twitter users and advertisers,” Enberg said. “Twitter’s corporate brand is already heavily intertwined with Musk’s personal brand, with or without the X name, and a lot of Twitter brand equity has already been lost between users and advertisers.”
Some speculated that the new name would confuse much of the Twitter audience, which was already ravaging the social media platform after Musk’s other tweaks, including limiting the number of tweets users could read each day. The new minimum is part of an $8-a-month subscription service Musk introduced earlier this year in an effort to boost Twitter’s revenue.
The likelihood of advertisers returning depends on how successful the rebranding is and whether Musk can achieve his goal of creating an “app of everything.” Advertising expert Marc DiMasimo said that’s not yet clear.
Advertisers care about what they buy. So if his strategies work, I don’t think advertisers could care much about what he calls it,” DiMassimo said.
He added, “I think the name change is just a way for him to say, ‘Stop getting Twitter predictions, this is something new, and judge it as something new. ‘” And you know that only works if the new thing works.”
Twitter users also noted that few people are referring to Alphabet, Google’s parent company since 2015. Facebook rebranded Meta in 2021, but its suite of apps — Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook — still retain their branding and logos.
The iconic blue bird logo went live on Twitter more than a decade ago in 2012, replacing the previous bird logo before the company debuted on Wall Street as a public company.
“I’m sad to see it go. It was a great track,” said Logo designer Martin Grasser. But 11 years, 12 years is really a long time for a corporate identity to remain. It looks like the platform is changing and they have a new direction and it makes sense that they’d choose a new logo to signify these changes.
He watches Twitter X: Elon Musk rebrands Twitter to X; Replaces the famous Blue Bird logo
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