An Eulogy to Twitter

Twitter is, um... *grabs my kerchief* was one of the most well-known apps and it recently ditched its universally recognised bird logo and branding in favour of the cheeky moniker X.

Well, it starts with Elon Musk himself. The letter X fascinated him since 1999 and he purchased the X.com domain to develop an online payment firm. Actually, It might have fascinated him since his early adulthood days. Ahem. One year later, it merged with another company called “Confinity” to create a large online payment platform. Musk wanted the new company to be called X.com. Soon, people both inside and outside the company thought it sounded like an adult video website, rather than a reputable payment company. And they were not wrong lol. Then, the executive board rejected the name as expected. Instead, they opted for “PayPal”, which is now a famous payment platform that is widely used for purchasing the premium versions of the same websites which people thought what the previously proposed name sounded like. The problem was that Musk lost ownership of the X.com domain when he sold all of his shares in PayPal in 2000 and left the company. He never lost his fascination with the letter, though. He later used it in 2002 when he founded the SpaceX corporation, his space exploration venture. Up until 2017, the X.com domain was under PayPal's possession. They then permitted Musk to purchase it back at an astronomical price. Although the exact cost of the purchase wasn't disclosed, it was assumed to be in the tens of millions. Musk maintained at the time that his sole motivation for reclaiming the X.com domain was purely sentimental. However, five years later, we have only recently witnessed and realised that there is more to the story. After acquiring Twitter, Musk said he would utilise the Twitter platform as a catalyst to develop X, the Everything app, which would merge social media, instant messaging, payment services, shopping, and more. Musk went on to start the rebranding process even though none of those features had been added to Twitter yet. When faced with severe backlash and criticism for discarding one of the most recognisable brand identities in the world, with its own word, ‘tweet’ in the dictionaries, Musk responded by saying; “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. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.” So that’s it. It is the story of Musk’s obsession with a letter and the beginning of a new era.

"Sleeping Bag" Esther Crawford, a Twitter insider who was sleeping on the floor of her office, provided a really insightful rantalysis(rant+analysis) of what was wrong with the Pre and Post-Musk Twitter.

For many people, Twitter was like a toxic, clingy boyfriend or girlfriend. To me, it resembled one. I learned a lot from it, including things about business, movies, football, politics, and much more. It provided me with a group of peers with whom I could verbally spar. Twitter was the place wherein the once long-awaited Valimai update came out first. Moreover, Twitter was home to the Hate-spewing Andrew Tates, incels, keyboard warriors, casteists, racists, anti-semitists, neo-nazis, etc… I miss the Twitter fan fights(Mainly Thala-thalapathy ones) though. *sobs* I might have ended my relationship with Twitter because I thought it was unhealthy and clingy. Concerning my screen time, I was worried. Nevertheless, it made for a fantastic escape. Not to mention, Twitter is still alive. So is the toxicity. It has returned under a different name. Bluebird, rest in peace.