2023-07-25 08:42:20
Elon Musk has once again made a major change to Twitter, which on Monday said “farewell” to its famous blue bird to become X, a new stage in the all-purpose super-application project that the entrepreneur wants to create and which is causing mixed reactions.
“In the coming months, we’ll be adding full communications and the ability to manage your entire financial world. The name Twitter doesn’t make sense in this context, so we have to say goodbye to the bird,” Musk said in a tweet on Tuesday.
If the X logo, black and white, appears well since Monday once connected to the site, its address remains, for the moment, Twitter.com. The mobile application still displays the image of the bird launched in 2006.
But letters were removed from the sign of the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, an AFP journalist noted on Monday.
By Sunday, Mr Musk had changed his profile picture on Twitter, replacing it with the new X logo, which he described as “art deco minimalist”.
“We will soon say goodbye (goodbye in French, editor’s note) to the Twitter brand and, gradually, to all the birds,” he tweeted on Saturday, to everyone’s surprise.
Questioned by an Internet user, Mr. Musk had indicated that the tweets would be called Xs after the name change. On Tuesday, the platform still published tweets and offered its usual blue button for “Tweeter”.
X is a mathematical symbol that the entrepreneur is particularly fond of.
X.com was the name and website of the online bank he founded in 1999, which later became the online payment service PayPal.
Mr. Musk has also taken up this symbol for the aerospace company SpaceX, the X Corp holding company which acquired Twitter, the xAI start-up dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI), unveiled in mid-July, and even for the first name of one of his children, a boy baptized X Æ A-12.
– Multi-faceted application –
This change of identity comes at a delicate time for Twitter, whose revenues have fallen by 50%, the platform being deserted by many advertisers scalded by the brutal reshuffle of Mr. Musk and decisions deemed difficult to read.
Since buying Twitter last year for $44 billion, Mr. Musk has regularly talked about his nebulous plan to turn it into a multi-faceted application, with financial services, like WeChat in China.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we are only just beginning to imagine,” the company’s new chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, said on Sunday.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity — centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking — creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities,” she added.
“There is absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can provide, well … everything”, continued this former executive of NBCUniversal, recruited by Mr. Musk in particular to try to reassure advertisers.
This new name could offer “a new beginning” to the social network, believes Vanitha Swaminathan, professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh. “But it has to be followed by specific measurements that show that something is actually happening,” she said.
“This change is a monumental marketing mistake,” entrepreneur Sam Kelly tweeted. “Twitter is an iconic global brand, with immense value. A whole terminology has been created around it”, like the verb tweeter, passed into everyday language, “which cannot be replicated with +X+”.
Simon Kemp, CEO of digital consultancy Kepios, said he was skeptical of Twitter’s ability to become a super app, which would require massive investment along the way, while Musk has been mostly focused on cutting costs so far.
However, the platform could become “an excellent aggregator of information” global and paid, he estimated.
The social network faces a myriad of competing apps, including Meta-launched newcomer Threads, which has around 117 million users, according to specialist firm Quiver Quantitative.
Twitter gathered, for its part, just over 200 million daily users at the beginning of July, according to the specialized company SensorTower.
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