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Follow @x, the official account of X, a new feature on Twitter that lets you create and join live audio conversations with your followers and other users. Learn how to use X, discover interesting topics and spaces, and connect with people who share your interests.
Aug 5, 2023 · Twitter's famous blue bird is dead; on July 23, Elon Musk decided to rebrand the social network simply as X, and we're frankly still getting used to it.
Nov 2, 2023 · Billionaire Elon Musk's social media platform Twitter has been issued with a demand from Australian authorities for information on what it is doing to tackle online hate.
- Annika Burgess
Beginning October 27th, 2023, we now offer two new tiers: Basic and Premium+. If you subscribed to Premium on iOS or web, you can now upgrade to Premium+. For any questions, contact X Premium support. X Premium is our premium subscription service that elevates quality conversations on the platform.
- Overview
- What will the app do now?
- What's with the letter X?
- What does this mean for Twitter?
- What are the roadblocks?
Big changes to Twitter 01:21
The internet is abuzz as the app formerly known as Twitter announced a name change last week. X.com now redirects to Twitter.com; the company's headquarters now sports a flashing X where there was once was a bird logo, and the app now appears as "X" in the Apple and Google app stores.
The rebrand is another step in the ongoing transformation of Twitter, once an online watering hole for hyper-connected people that is aiming to become an app that can do "everything," according to newly installed CEO Linda Yaccarino.
"Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app," the company's owner, billionaire Elon Musk, recently said.
"The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video. In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world," he added.
Here's what the shift means for X as Musk seeks to reinvent Twitter, which he bought in 2022 for $44 billion.
Musk has been vocal about his goal of turning Twitter into a so-called super-app, something akin to China's WeChat. For now there's no American equivalent to such an app, but industry experts imagine an app that encompasses basically anything a person wants to do online.
"Consumers of the app can do a lot of different things on the platform, whether it's listen to a podcast, shop, watch videos," said Nii Ahene, chief strategy officer of marketing firm Tinuiti.
Twitter already lets users engage in live audio conversations, send longer text messages and broadcast video, such as the new show former Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently launched on the platform. If Twitter's push into paid subscriptions is successful, it could eventually expand into sharing some subscription revenue with users.
"In theory, they can become a more mainstream version of Patreon or other similar platforms," Ahene said. "Whether they succeed remains to be seen. It's not the reason people go to Twitter today, so to reposition the company … would take significant investment and time with what's really a skeleton team."
Musk appears to have a longstanding fixation on the letter X, dubbing his very first startup X.com. (After a merger, the app became PayPal, although Musk reportedly pushed for it to keep the name X, according to biographer Walter Isaacson.) After buying Twitter, Musk reportedly texted Isaacson that he was "very excited about finally implementing X.com as it should have been done, using Twitter as an accelerant!"
The letter X surfaces throughout Musk's other endeavors as well, including his space-exploration venture SpaceX, his recently launched artificial-intelligence app xAI and the Model X, one of electric car company Tesla's earliest models. Musk even refers to his son with singer Grimes, by the name X.
"It's just X, the letter X," he said on the Joe Rogan Experience recently, explaining how to pronounce his son X Æ A-XII's name.
Musk regained ownership of X.com six years ago. He formally changed Twitter's legal name to X Corp in April. Over the weekend, X.com was redirected to Twitter.com, and on Monday a crane began to remove Twitter's iconic bird logo from the company's San Francisco headquarters. However, police stopped the work soon after it began.
For now, the platform's rebrand is just a name change — no new features have been introduced, staying true to Musk's apparent preferred product strategy of hype first, delivery much later.
But the name change suggests Musk is likely to keep control of the company for the near future, said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandeep Singh. After Musk's takeover in April of 2022, some observers believed the billionaire could make some changes to Twitter and quickly flip it to a different owner, Singh said.
To be sure, there are many ways an "everything app" could fail, from simply confusing its users to struggling to attract enough advertisers.
"If you look at what Tesla's done in terms of advertising, which is very little, [Musk's] belief is that good product sells itself and you don't need to advertise it. Meanwhile, you have many, many large brands and companies that spend millions of dollars on Twitter and would beg to differ," said Aaron Goldman, chief marketing officer for Mediaocean, an advertising partner of Twitter's.
Expanding the platform's reach to include things like shopping and paid subscription content could actually help it flourish in the long term by creating several revenue streams and making it less reliant on large companies' willingness to spend money, analysts said.
In the short term, building out those capabilities would require a massive investment in staff and infrastructure. It's far from clear if a company that slashed about three-quarters of its staff and is now embroiled in multiple lawsuits over unpaid bills can deliver that.
Mar 28, 2024 · E lon Musk has announced new changes to social media platform X (formerly Twitter) that will allow certain accounts to unlock free premium features.
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Jul 24, 2023 · The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X.com on its website and started replacing the bird logo with a stylized version of the 24th letter of the Latin...
