Random Thoughts – Randocity!

In an odd move, Elon Musk has now officially thrown out the baby with the bathwater in Twitter’s rebrand to ‘X’. Yes, Elon Musk has officially rebranded Twitter to the single letter ‘X’. This will be short and sweet. Let’s explore.

X as a brand

Let’s jump right into this extremely questionable change. Twitter, as its former brand, had built extremely strong brand loyalty. From the cute and very much G-rated iconic blue bird to the light featured microblogging interface of the platform itself. Arguably, that small blue bird told you everything you needed to know about Twitter at first glance. There was no brand confusion between Twitter, the Twitter bird icon and any other platform or industry. Twitter was (and is) an entirely unique brand. Twitter even went so far as to define a new word in our vernacular as ‘tweet’ to signify the small microblog conversations on the platforms. Twitter was (and perhaps still is) about as strong a brand identifier as anyone could ever hope to produce for a product… and now it’s being totally thrown away.

On the other hand, ‘X’ has too many other uses and connotations in both the technology industry and in other industries, such as within Motion Pictures. Yeah…

I mean, why would you abscond with a single letter as a brand; a letter that, within the porn motion picture industry signifies adult content? X is also used by operating system designers for X11 or simply X for short, the graphical user interface server. Even Mac OS X’s branding could be conflated… and that’s perhaps what Elon is hoping. Between X-rated movie content and X utilized in the operating systems including with Mac OS X, the branding of ‘X’ is ripe for confusion and conflation. It’s even the middle letter in the word toXic, which Twitter has fully become since Musk’s takeover.

X also signifies crossing letters, words or phrases out and it sometimes even means ‘deletion’. Twitter was always about creating new content, never about deleting it or marking it out. It’s an odd play to buy a domain and rebrand when ‘X’, in terms of writing prose, has always signified deletion, hiding or marking something out. Again, this is a completely negative general connotation when applied to writing prose.

In other words, X is probably the worst brand identifier anyone could possibly choose for any site, least of all for Twitter!!??

Flipping the Bird

Elon Musk seems intent on flipping the bird at all things Dorsey. In that vein, Musk has questionably decided to rebrand Twitter to something other than Twitter. Um… Okay. However, rebranding is not necessarily a smart idea, but so be it. It even seems that Elon has thrown away yet more money to obtain the one letter domain x.com to support the rebranding (which this domain purchase probably cost him no less than $50k, but probably closer to $1 million or more), which at this moment redirects to Twitter.com.

(Note: Not linkifying any of Twitter’s domains in this article is entirely intentional. If you wish to visit any of the domains stated, you will need to type the domains into your browser manually.)

Clearly, Elon seems intent on replacing twitter.com with x.com at some point in the future. There are probably too many technologies within Twitter’s own internal software stack which reference the twitter.com domain name to change to x.com instantly. Redirection is the easiest (and laziest) first step.

Branding Difficulties?

The problem with this ‘X’ branding is not only its bad connotations around the porn industry, the colors chosen also embolden a very dark look. Dark grey and black brandings don’t say light and cheery. X’s color choices and even the letter itself say “dark and sinister.” Because X looms large with already existing, huge negative connotations, attempting to apply that to a site which is intended to offer a small, light microblogging interface that’s intended to be both fun and informational only serves to change the meaning and tone of this site in the negative.

Twitter has already embodied negative connotations ever since Musk took over. With his questionable foray into allowing the MAGA extremists back onto the site, allowing those bad actors to spew both conspiratorial and provably false rhetoric, Twitter is no longer a safe space. Twitter’s once light, safe environment disappeared the instant Musk took over, now solidified by this ‘X’ branding change.

Since Musk, Twitter has become an unsafe haven for negative, false and useless information. It is also a new toXic cesspool of hate and violence speech. If that’s what Musk was going for with the X branding, then well done. You’ve succeeded in turning Twitter into a toXic cesspool of false rhetoric, hate and violence.

Death Knell

With this rebranding to X, the only thing I expect to see is the final remaining advertisers to abandon what’s left of Musk’s quickly sinking website. Why would you, as an advertiser, want to associate your advertising brand with a brand identity that appears to be associated with negative adult content? Yeah. Not smart, but then we already knew that Elon Musk’s intelligence was limited to salesmanship, not in operating technology sites.

With this extremely questionable rebranding, I fully expect Twitter to wind down operations within 6-9 months… closing its doors soon after. There’s honestly no way to bring a modicum of safety or even the idea of safety to a site branded as ‘X’.

X doesn’t say, “safe.” On the contrary, this new branding says, toXic, adult porn content. If Musk wanted an intense uphill battle to try and change this letter’s already mired past uses, changing to X is the perfect way to get that challenge; a challenge I don’t think Musk is smart enough to win. Here you had a perfect branding with Twitter and the blue bird. Then, the current owner abandons it over a single letter that appears dark and sinister and which is mired in both adult content connotations and other technology uses. Nope, Musk is not very smart at all!

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