Like a venomous puss moth rising from its arduous cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has totally metamorphosed into X.com.
Varied components of Twitter had already embraced the rebranding, and the corporate has been using X.com hyperlinks since early April. However now the area has flipped over totally, marking the top of a tumultuous transition interval—and erasing the final vestiges of the fowl app.
“We’re letting you understand that we’re altering our URL, however your privateness and information safety settings stay the identical,” reads a message on the backside of the X login and residential pages.
The switchover has been a very long time coming. Musk introduced the shift from Twitter to X last July. However the billionaire has for many years harbored a dream of making an “all the pieces app” by that title, and Twitter is his vessel.
“The Twitter title made sense when it was simply 140-character messages going backwards and forwards—like birds tweeting—however now you’ll be able to publish nearly something, together with a number of hours of video,” Musk wrote on the newly redubbed X final summer time. “Within the months to come back, we’ll add complete communications and the flexibility to conduct your complete monetary world. The Twitter title doesn’t make sense in that context, so we should bid adieu to the fowl.”
Twitter underneath Musk has certainly added video and voice calls to its roster of options. It has additionally replatformed conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, fostered a welcoming environment for porn spam accounts, made an absolute hash out of verification, launched a monetization system that encourages rampant engagement farming, gutted its trust and safety team, allowed a surge in hate speech on the platform, designated NPR as “US state-affiliated media,” removed news headlines totally after which reintroduced them in a bizarre spot, kneecapped a bunch of enjoyable bots and third-party apps by introducing wildly expensive API changes whereas giving blue-check verification to AI-generated chum, pivoted to video, launched an AI mannequin that can help you do crimes, and overseen a decline in utilization of greater than 20 % within the US, in line with app analytics agency SensorTower.
The “complete monetary world” half stays a piece in progress.
A sentimentalist might bemoan the death of Twitter, which for all its faults all the time had a capability to please and shock. However do not forget that this transformation was inevitable. Musk first owned X.com in 1999, when he cofounded a web based financial institution by that title; it could finally merge with a competitor and change into PayPal. He purchased X.com again from PayPal in 2017, tweeting that it had “nice sentimental worth.” And he has seen Twitter as a vessel to create X on Earth since earlier than the acquisition was even accomplished, in line with Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.
“Within the days main as much as his takeover of Twitter on the finish of October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated wildly,” Isaacson wrote in Elon Musk. “He mentioned that he would flip it into the mixture of monetary platform and social community he had envisioned 24 years earlier for X.com, and he added that he deliberate to rebrand it with that title, which he beloved.”
To place a fair finer level on it, Musk’s tweet today asserting that “all core programs are actually on X.com” featured the brand of the corporate he based 25 years in the past.
Whereas X might by no means change into the all the pieces app of Musk’s desires, it’s undeniably and indelibly a unique place than the one he purchased. Which in some methods makes this ultimate transition all of the extra palatable. No matter Elon Musk’s platform has change into, it’s definitely not Twitter. Name it no matter you need.