Is there a strange new "X" app on your phone that you don't remember installing? If you don't keep up with the news, you can be forgiven for being thrown off by this. But don't worry, it's not a virus or anything malicious---it's just Twitter's new branding. So, actually, maybe it is a little malicious.
After purchasing Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has been trying all sorts of tricks to justify the acquisition and turn the famously unprofitable social media company into a money-making machine. We've seen premium subscriptions for the Blue checkmarks, tweet limits for non-subscribers, sweeping layoffs, and now an unexpected rebranding from Twitter to X.
I'm sure that'll fix it.
Rebranding is an enormously risky move for a company. Most of the time, it's several months in the making and customers will be repeatedly alerted to the upcoming change. After all, nobody wants to spend a fortune on a new name and logo, only to lose half their customer base because suddenly no one knows who they are. But in typical Musk fashion, there's no time for any of that careful consideration.
Instead, Musk's forewarning amounted to a handful of seemingly unplanned tweets on a Sunday evening. That same night, the Twitter logo changed to a new, black-and-white X logo. And shortly after that, the logo and app names on people's phones began switching to match the new X branding.
All this took place without so much as an email notifying users of the change. Understandably, this has caused plenty of confusion for anyone suddenly unable to find the Twitter app on their phone and baffled by the unexpected X app that replaced it. Some have even uninstalled the mysterious new app.
The transition has been far from smooth. Initially, Apple blocked the X app name from its App Store due to existing restrictions on single-letter names. At the same time, Twitter was blocked in Indonesia due to past connections between the X.com domain and pornography.
The confusion hasn't been helped by the fragmented execution of Twitter's rebranding, which is yet incomplete. Right now, X.com still redirects users to Twitter.com, rather than the other way around. X's About page still refers to the company as Twitter throughout. And although we've been informed that "tweets" are to be known as "x's," we're yet to get a new term for "retweets."
There's no doubt Musk will have a well-thought-out, practical, and effective solution to that, just as he's had for the other issues at Twitter---sorry, X.
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