I think we should respect the owner(s) of X and respect its due as a company.
And, actually, no, I’m not kidding. “Twitter” was a company that some people used, and now it is not.
X is the new company. It’s not like I’m going to go ride around in my new Edsel or relax with a healthful Chesterfield while enjoying the view of my gleaming Frigidaire.
Twitter isn’t the king of France…it’s dead! Long live X. Or whatever.
He certainly can and does so like a patient under the care of Nurse Ratched, and I’m sure he plays cards daily with Mac and Cheswick.
Here’s a rare “hot take” from me: I don’t think that fucker deserves to use the name Twitter. He bought it, and he renamed it.
But he didn’t buy the people who cling to its legacy platform. Right or wrong, it’s still a “name,” but perhaps that name should change.
/* edit: Is it Denali or Mt. McKinley? Which twin has the tony? Who knows. It’s very difficult to tell. Maybe both twins have the tony. That kid has both his arms in traction he beats everybody in the room. So I’ll offer it to you again: is the name worth that much?
Well, I agree with the second sentence. And I’m very sure Elon Musk in several years will be in his personal hell “armed” with a keyhole saw, no clothes, and an eternity to ponder his fate.
It’s just a website with an unfortunate name that spawned a number of vulgarisms like “tweet,” “tweeted,” and all the rest.
That website and name no longer exist, except as a footnote. I’d rather move on, rather than remember the glory days. Opinions vary.
Which is it? Is the name “unfortunate” or is it a lightning-in-a-bottle coup that entered the language in a way advertisers would kill for? It can’t be both.
There’s a music venue near Pittsburgh that was originally called StarLake Amphitheater. It has since had numerous names, as different companies have sponsored it.
I still refer to it as StarLake and everyone my age knows where I mean.
This is maybe even a step further: if I say I saw something on Twitter, people know what I mean — and if I say I saw something on X, it’s a roll of the fucking dice.
I’ve never sent a tweet nor gone to Twitter/X to read one. But if someone refers to Twitter/a tweet, at least I know what they are referring to. If used in context, I remember that X is Musk’s new name for Twitter, but it makes the reference one step more distant/obscure.
I have never heard a person referring to having sent/read an X - or whatever the current usage ought to be. So as long as Twitter is the common usage, journalists ought to include that reference.
Meta and Alphabet - I recognize those as being the new names/parent companies of Google and Facebook (had to look FB up in this thread), but for this luddite, those names obscure more than they explain.
Except that, unlike twitter, Xerox ,Kleenex , and Facebook still exist and haven’t changed their names.
“Meta” and “alphabet” are more analogous to the names of other big companies, -such as car manufacturers. People refer to their car as a Buick, not a “General Motors”. The larger entity which owns it does not erase the brand names.
. But “X” is intended to erase the brand name of twitter.
A stupid idea, of course. Which leads to my next question: Has anybody ever asked Elon Musk why he chose “X”, and is he aware of how stupid it makes him look?
It still boggles my mind to think that someone that is supposed to be a genius in business would fail to understand the value of something so basic as a brand name.