On 23 July we said ‘Bye Bye Birdie’ to Twitter.
Since Elon Musk’s infamous takeover back in October 2022, the established social platform has been undergoing changes. The most significant so far being its controversial rebranding to X, which has seen the platform ditch its iconic blue bird logo in favour of a black and white X.
The announcement was made after the X logo was projected onto the side of the San Francisco headquarters on the evening of the 23 July, and this new identity came after it was announced that users were going to be capped on the number of posts, they can read on the app each day.
CEO Linda Yaccarino, announced how X Corp (formerly Twitter, Inc) plans to make X ‘the future state of unlimited interactivity’ with the app now being ‘centred in audio, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.’
She claims that there is ‘no limit to this transformation’, setting new goals for the company to transform the platform into an ‘everything app’, to reshape the brand into a ‘global town square’.
Musk’s idea of creating an ‘everything app’ has been inspired by the Chinese app – WeChat – which has a very different approach to other traditionally used social channels. It has all features in one place including messaging, social, video calls, payment, and mini apps encouraging users to be loyal in using the platform for multiple purposes.
The app remains popular with over one billion active monthly users and at present it’s functions remain the same as Twitter. As X evolves, it’ll be interesting to see how things develop as new competitors such as Threads and the Tik Tok text post feature come to the fore.
Scanning the social and news scape, it’s clear many are questioning the rebrand and how much planning actually took place with Domain Name Systems (DNS) not even up to date, suggesting Musk was too eager to launch. The basic precautions for registering similar domains had not been taken and are putting many users at risk of computer bugging, hacking, and having their personal data leaked.
With very little confirmed information on the future of X, we’re unsure how quickly rumoured changes will start to be introduced, but Musk has said that the app will be powered by AI, connecting us in ways we can only begin to imagine.
We can likely expect the most immediate change to be adapting the current retweeting function with plenty more on the horizon