I don’t use it, but i’ll forever call it Twitter.
“wasn’t a bad name” is the understatement of the year. it was one of the most successful brand names ever. normal people with functioning brains would kill to have a brand that’s so ingrained in the language, especially without the threat of genericizing the trademark.
xerox didn’t want people to use xerox as a generic verb to mean photocopy, or kleenex the same for a generic tissue.
but Twitter was never used to mean another social media site, and tweeting never means posting on Facebook or Tumblr or whatever. a tweet is specifically a post on Twitter. that’s the perfect brand.
Is this just a really bad business deal followed by absurdly poor leadership, but very visible?
Did Elon make it obvious he had a completely different vision for twitter when he talked about buying it?
no, but he was always chasing that “everything app”, some Chinese apps are like that and are probably insanely profitable so of course he wanted to do it himself for the US.
after he was forced to buy Twitter for a ridiculously high price reserved only for the most idiotic and/or insane of all people, he probably “thought” (a generous metaphor i use to describe the activity inside his cromagnon skull) that he might as well just do that with Twitter and hope it eventually makes enough money to make up for the worst high profile business decision in recent memory. that’s why he’s pushed for more functionalities like making Twitter a video platform, and doing meetups or whatever they’re called.
he wanted “x” to be a thing since before he was really known all that much by the public, and probably felt appropriate with the direction change for Twitter because he still “thought” it would be cool to have something called X because he lives in the past and has the sensibilities of a child who’s desperate to look cool.
so here we are, take the world’s best known brand name and replace it with a single letter that is widely used to mean unknown. fucking idiot.
