Twitter’s owner Elon Musk and its new CEO said Sunday that
the social media network would ditch its bird logo, be rebranded with the name
X and move quickly into payments, banking and commerce.
Founded in 2006, Twitter takes its name from the sound of
birds chattering, and it has used avian branding since its early days, when the
company bought a stock symbol of a light blue bird for $15, according to the
design website Creative Bloq.
Tweeting a picture of the company’s new logo – a white X on
a black background – late Sunday night, Twitter chief executive Linda Yaccarino
said “X is here! Let’s do this.”
Also late Sunday night, Musk changed his profile picture to
the company’s new logo, which he described as “minimalist art deco,” and
changed his Twitter bio to “X.com,” which now redirects to twitter.com.
Musk had earlier tweeted that “If a good enough X logo is
posted tonight, we’ll make (it) go live worldwide tomorrow.”
Musk also tweeted that under the site’s new identity, a post
would be called “an X.”
The changes were not visible on the website as of 0630 GMT
Monday.
Musk had already named Twitter’s parent company the X
Corporation, and previously said his takeover of the social media giant was “an
accelerant to creating X, the everything app” — a reference to the X.com
company he founded in 1999, a later version of which went on to become payments
giant PayPal.
Such an app could still function as a social media platform,
and also include messaging and mobile payments.
“Powered by AI, X will connect us in ways we’re just
beginning to imagine,” Yaccarino tweeted earlier on Sunday.
Yaccarino, an advertising sales executive at NBCUniversal
who Musk poached last month to become Twitter’s CEO, said the social media
platform was on the cusp of broadening its scope.
“X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered
in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace
for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities,” Yaccarino tweeted.
– New revenue streams
–
Since Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, the
platform’s advertising business has partially collapsed as marketers soured on
mass firings at the company that gutted content moderation — as well as on
Musk’s management style.
In response, the billionaire SpaceX boss has moved toward
introducing payments and commerce through the platform in a search for new
revenue.
Twitter is thought to have around 200 million daily active
users, but it has suffered repeated technical failures since the 52-year-old
Tesla founder bought the app and sacked much of its staff.
Since then, many users and advertisers alike have responded
adversely to the social media site’s new charges for previously free services,
its changes to content moderation and the return of previously banned
right-wing accounts.
Musk said this month that Twitter had lost roughly half of
its advertising revenue since he took control in October.
Facebook parent Meta also this month launched its own
text-based platform, called Threads, which has up to 150 million users,
according to some estimates.
But the amount of time users spend on the rival app has
plummeted in the weeks since its launch, according to data from market analysis
firm Sensor Tower.
AFP
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