Twitter owner Elon Musk is trying to establish X as the new name for the short message service. On Monday, only small steps were initially visible: the name and logo of Twitter’s official profile were changed to an X, and the letter was also projected onto the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. However, the profile’s account name was still “@twitter” and the well-known Twitter logo with the blue bird could be found throughout the website and app.
With a renaming, Musk would drop a more than 15-year-old brand with worldwide recognition and high recognition value. However, he was determined to go through with the project. When YouTuber Marques Brownlee wrote that he would continue to call the service Twitter, Musk replied: “Not for long.”
Musk bought Twitter for around $44 billion last October. He brought the online service to a new company called X Corp earlier this spring. a. The website x.com has been redirecting to Twitter since Sunday. This also works by adding individual profile names to the website address – and could be the first step in moving from twitter.com to x.com.
Twitter as a “super app”
Musk has previously claimed he wants to expand Twitter into a platform called X, a super app with all sorts of features modeled on something like WeChat in China. However, apart from the granting of licenses for money transfers in three US states, hardly any steps in this direction have been announced.
The tech billionaire announced over the weekend that they would “soon say goodbye to the Twitter brand.” At the same time, he generally likes to provoke and had the Twitter logo replaced for a few days in April with the symbol of the digital currency Dogecoin.
Musk recently admitted that Twitter’s advertising revenue has halved since the takeover. The advertising revenues are traditionally the central source of money for the service. Some large advertisers have left the service, fearing a more negative environment for their brands under Musk. He is meanwhile focusing more on the subscription business. At the same time, he brought in the experienced manager Linda Yaccarino, who was previously responsible for the advertising business at the media giant NBCUniversal, for the top post. She supported the renaming in a series of tweets on Monday night. (dpa)