Elon Musk, who bought twitter in recent times after paying $44 billion USD and took the company private, is now pushing hard to rebrand the microblogging social media platform to its new name and identity ‘X’. In this regard there are several changes, which have already been done to the site’s interface and even more.
When first the logo of twitter was changed on website, many including me thought that Elon Musk is just messing around and it is again one of his stunts which he keeps pulling time to time, specially with twitter. However, recent actions and developments on twitter site and beyond dictate that no it was not a stunt, Elon Musk with his team is very serious about rebranding the twitter to X.
In a bit of time, below, we will walk you through few very obvious and less obvious actions which Elon Musk have taken in order to rebrand the twitter platform to its new name X. So some of these actions can be seen below on this page.
Twitter logo changed from Bird to X
The most obvious one is that the logo of twitter website have been changed from old bird logo to new X logo, as it can been seen in the screenshot below.
Text on buttons changed from tweet to Post
As twitter platform had buttons to post content and each post was called a tweet. However, now the twitter is getting away from that model. Tweets are now just called the posts. Also to depict that text on all buttons which were there to post content is changed to just plain and simple ‘Post’ from old text, which was ‘tweet’. You can see this in the image below.
Username ‘X’ now belongs to the platform
The twitter handle or Username ‘X’ now belongs to the X platform itself. Previously, the handle was possession of the photographer who had it in possession for more than 10 years. However, it was just grabbed from him, he was assigned as longer username with x on start and few numbers Following them. An email from twitter offered him a visit to the platform headquarters. According to latest info we have, the user was least interested in the visit to headquarters as said, he had visited twitter headquarters earlier. He was expecting something or much better outcome from the situation, like a tesla model X or some monetary compensation.
Domain X.com now redirects to twitter.com
The domain X.com is only redirected or added as and addon domain to twitter for now. So if you write x.com in the browser, you will be redirected to twitter.com. That shows the intent of twitter, that they are serious in rebranding the platform. However, transition will be considered complete fully when X.com opens the platform and twitter.com domain just redirects people to new X.com domain. Reportedly, the domain X.com is blocked in some Asian countries due to some other concerns. However, X platform teams must be working on that to sort the issues out before making the full transition to new domain.
What was to achieve by rebranding twitter to X
We have our own guesses about what Elon Musk wanted to achieve by rebranding the twitter platform to new X platform. When twitter started it was truly a microblogging platform, as it only allowed two 160 characters of text in a post. So that post was called a tweet. Tweet in real world means a chirp of a young or a small bird. So small text can be more inline with word tweet but now when platform the offers videos and image posting facilities along with text, calling the post a tweet would not be much appropriate.
Also rebranding could be a statement to Meta from Elon Musk. According to my analysis Elon Musk wants his platform to be seen as full fledge social media website instead of a microblogging site. Twitter or X platform already allows its paid and verified users the facility to post much longer texts, longer than the character limits for other users.
After Meta tried to invade the space of twitter by introducing the threads platform, seems like Elon Musk is now striking back by taking the twitter from a microblogging website to a full fledge social media platform just like Facebook.
If it is really the intention of Elon Musk to take twitter to a full fledge social media platform like facebook, I bet, he will be very successful in that. As facebook users and specially the pages are experiencing very low organic reach despite having high number of followers. For pages with now followers, the facebook platform is totally dead in terms of organic reach.
The X platform can take advantage of low organic reach of facebook and attract some of those users. However, for that X will have to take few extra steps, like removing the character limits on text in post for all users across the board. Also removing any limits on size and length of videos posted on the platform.