I wish I was able to adequately convey exactly how tired I am of talking about my once favorite social media platform, but you wouldn’t believe me because here we go again. I’m like that weirdo who just can’t get over his X.
Elon Musk has officially rebranded Twitter into X, sort of. I mean, he changed the Twitter bird icon into an X. So that’s something.
If I were doing a rebranding I would make sure that everything changed all at once rather than doing it piecemeal, but Elon Musk is far more successful than I will ever be so who am I to question him? As of now, the bird logo is gone and the X logo is live, but twitter.com is still the main URL, they’re still called tweets, and the default color-scheme is still Twitter’s trademark blue
From MSN:
The change hasn't been executed very thoroughly yet; for example, Twitter's official blog and help center still prominently feature the bird-shaped logo. It appears, however, that it's just a matter of time until Twitter becomes fully X-fied.
So it would seem a lot of birds still have to die to complete Elon Musk’s X-ray vision.
Taking a look at the rebrand itself, I’m not particularly impressed. The Twitter bird logo was, frankly, iconic, and the new X, while possibly temporary, is nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad by any means, but I just think the letter x makes for a difficult logo.
As for the seeming new color-scheme, that’s where Musk is really stretching his creativity. Black and white. How exciting. Once again, Twitter’s blue was iconic to the brand and you’re throwing it away for monochrome. Maybe instead of X Corp. Musk should have put Twitter underneath his Boring Co.
And then there’s Twitter’s brand identity. No, it’s not just iconic, it’s absolutely priceless, and Musk seems to be throwing it away. Everyone knows what Twitter is and what a tweet is without having to think about it at all. Everyone. Nobody knows, or probably cares, what an X is. Losing that identity and brand recognition right when Mark Zuckerberg launched his, hopefully ill-fated, Twitter-rival Threads seems like a really dumb move to me.
When Google re-incorporated itself under Alphabet it didn’t feel the need to rebrand all of its products; Google remained Google, Gmail remained Gmail, and YouTube remained YouTube. Likewise with Facebook under Meta; Facebook is still Facebook and Instagram is still Instagram. Musk talks about making X an “everything app,” but I fail to see why that requires a rebranding of Twitter. Twitter could simply have been one part of the X-osphere.
At best I think this rebrand simply does nothing for X beyond the initial buzz, and will more likely cause people to ignore the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter going forward. As I’ve said previously, it would be a shame if Meta’s Threads overtakes Twitter, but maybe it would be best if they simply both fail at this point. Maybe what’s best for all of us is the rise of new brands like Substack to dominate the internet and let these old brands die or fade into irrelevance like MySpace.