Now that Elon killed the cute little blue birdie, are we supposed to use a different term for the noun “tweet” or for the verb “to tweet”?
The letter X doesn’t seem to convey what the word “tweet” has been doing for the past few years.
A “tweet.” Why anyone would decide to change a name brand with that kind of global acceptance is beyond me.
ETA: no doubt the owner of the company has come up with some kind of juvenile appellation no one will use, but I don’t recall it. Probably a “poop” or a “queef” or something similar.
Apparently the very generic “Post”:
What do we call tweets?
Tweets are now posts. In the same app update that wiped out the bird logo, the company swapped its classic blue “tweet” button for one that says “post.”
According to the horse’s mouth, a tweet is now called an X:
I think one “posts” an “X”.
Do branding changes away from well known brands EVER work? Ever?
I’m not talking about subtle things like the gradual, evolutionary changes to the Coca Cola logo. This is more like calling Coca Cola by a totally different name. There have to be SOME examples of major branding changes helping… but I cannot think of any.
I’ve known of companies that made name changes or major logo changes and in not one single case that I am familiar with did it accomplish anything except make a branding consultant rich.
Datsun’s change to Nissan is an example of a successful name change.
Since the question has been factually answered, is it now permissible to comment that I don’t believe that response came out of the mouth of the horse?
People still say they need to get stuff printed out at Kinko’s, a brand name that hasn’t existed since 2008.
Since it is “X”, call it an “X-crement”.
I didn’t know that. And I go to Kinkos now and then.
I think everyone will still say “Tweet” and even “twitter.” Who’s going to stop them?
Their original brand in Japan was “Nissan” and they only used “Datsun” for exports. A few years ago Nissan completely phased out the Datsun brand and started calling everything Nissans worldwide. So not really a complete name change.
Many, many years ago I worked for “Datsun” at their then-new US headquarters in Gardena CA
TwiX. Sonst ändert sich nix. (German ad when they changed the name from Raider to Twix, any German over 30 knows this. Translation of the jingle: Raider is now called Twix, nothing else changes. Only in German it rhymes).
I look forward to Mars, Inc. suing X too.
This. Just call it a tweet. Musk might be able to get major news sites and the like to start using whatever nonsense he comes up with by threatening to sue them if they use the old terms, but he can’t sue everyone in the world. So just keep using tweet. We’ll all understand what you’re talking about, and it will annoy the fuck out of Musk that we’re not all falling in line with his Great Notion.
I think “Tweet” is going to be genericized now. People will start saying “so-and-so tweeted on Threads.”
I never called Prince anything else but “Prince” and I’ll be damned if I’m going to give Elon Musk the satisfaction.
Now if you’ll excuse me I have to finish hoovering the house and open up the old kelvinator to start fixing supper.
Well, yes and no. I know the company was always called Nissan, but from the perspective of Americans who were used to the Datsun name, it certainly felt like a name change when they started using the Nissan brand instead. IIRC they tried to gradually phase in the Nissan name. For a few years in the early 1980s their cars were branded as “Datsun by Nissan”. Then they switched to primarily using the name “Nissan”, but the cars still had a smaller “Datsun” badge for a few years to remind people that Nissan was the brand formerly known as Datsun.
There are tons of brand studies and their values that have been done. The only motivation of Musk’s I can see in making this change is wiping away a shit-load of brand value that he can now write-off from the purchase price allocation that happened when he acquired the company. So maybe a tax benefit that he generates. …and because he’s an egomaniac and it’s his company and he can.
I was going to make that joke. Well, actually I was going to suggest X-cretion.
Same pile of 
Under US law, in order to deduct the unamortized cost of an intangible asset acquired in a transaction, you have to dispose of every intangible asset that you acquired in that transaction, and this is presumably to prevent shenanigans like you’re alluding to. If he attempts to do that without first canceling the registration of twitter.com (so it can’t even redirect to X.com) and then purging the entire user database of what was Twitter and force everyone to sign up again for X.com somehow, without ever having anything announced on twitter.com about it, there is a pretty good argument that he’s still using one of the intangibles that he acquired in the transaction. If he does that, he literally would destroy the value of any potential assets that he might have acquired, but if he even announces on twitter.com that he wants all twitter users to sign up on X.com, he could be argued to not have disposed of the goodwill.
There must be cases where there was a major public scandal where someone bought and renamed what was left…