What has Elon Musk carried out now?
Nine months after shopping for Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has determined to rebrand the platform. The title Twitter will likely be gone, as will its iconic chook brand. In their place, Musk is planning on renaming the platform X.
Why X?
That is understood solely by Musk himself, however he does have a fascination with the letter. It appears to have begun with X.com, the web funds firm Musk launched in 1999 and made his fortune from after merging with PayPal. Since then, he has gone on to launch SpaceX, whereas his electrical car firm Tesla sells the Model X automotive, he named certainly one of his sons X Æ A-12 and he not too long ago launched a man-made intelligence enterprise, xAI.
What else will change in addition to the title?
The brand, for one factor: Musk held a crowdsourced competitors to interchange the Twitter chook brand with a brand new one. The winner was Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt, who supplied Musk a brand beforehand designed for a now-discontinued podcast. And this new lick of paint is only the start, if Musk and the corporate’s CEO, Linda Yaccarino, are to be believed.
Yaccarino tweeted (or ought to that now be “xed”?) that “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. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.”
What that really means is troublesome to discern. It could possibly be a nod to Musk’s longstanding plans to develop an “everything app” within the method of China’s WeChat – one thing Musk mentioned again in October 2022 his buy of Twitter was an “accelerant” for.
But observers are unimpressed. “By claiming that X will be the platform that can deliver everything, [Yaccarino] is forgetting that the internet exists,” says Steven Buckley at City, University of London. “The internet is the platform for everything.”
Will this plan work?
Probably not. Everything apps, fashionable in China, contain giving entry to giant elements of your life to the individuals operating them. The previous few months of chaos below Musk might postpone some sceptics from permitting the entrepreneur’s agency to entry their financial institution accounts.
For that cause, Musk will likely be counting on the speed of latest arrivals to X outpacing these abandoning ship. “If Twitter management is hoping to attract new people to the platform, they hope they are enough to replace the ones they continue to lose and alienate,” says Om Malik, a outstanding tech investor.
So ought to I transfer to Threads as a substitute?
Meta’s Twitter-alike app, launched earlier this month, would seem like probably the most safe lifeboat for these seeking to escape Twitter (or X) in the long term. It is backed by Mark Zuckerberg’s large tech firm, and has built-in integrations with Instagram. The group behind it has promised extra options within the coming weeks and months to compete with Twitter.
What about Bluesky?
The decentralised different to Twitter, began by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has its personal points, together with content material moderation snafus. In phrases of customers, it has largely been overtaken by Threads, which was capable of faucet into Instagram’s current community to succeed in 100 million customers in simply 5 days. Bluesky continues to be an invite-only app, and as such is rising far slower, with round 350,000 reported customers.
Are there another options?
An whole cavalcade of rivals has popped as much as try to capitalise on Twitter’s travails. Mastodon was one early different, however stays the protect of tech adherents, whereas Post.Social, Spill, T2 and others make up the pack.
But that is the nub of the issue: at current, there isn’t actually a direct different to Twitter with all of the options customers love. Whether they care to stay round on X stays to be seen.
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Source: www.newscientist.com