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The tech billionaire has started the bird logo, which has been part of Twitter’s identity since 2006.
By Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu
Ryan Mac on Twitter and Tiffany Hsu on misinformation.
For more than 10 years, Twitter has been recognizable through its blue and white bird logo, which has a symbol of the social network’s unique culture and lexicon. “Tweet” has a verb. A “tweet” refers to a post. “Tweeps” is nicknamed after Twitter employees.
On Sunday night, Elon Musk got rid of all that.
The tech billionaire, who bought Twitter last year, renamed the social platform X. com on its online page and began replacing the bird’s logo with a stylized edition of the letter 24 of the Latin alphabet.
On Monday, inside Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, X logos were projected in the cafeteria, while words containing X were recalled in convention halls, adding “eXposure,” “eXult” and “s3Xy,” according to images published by The New York Times. Workers also began wearing bird-related accessories, such as a giant blue logo in the cafeteria. Outside the building, staff got rid of the first six letters of the Twitter call before the San Francisco Police Department arrested them for doing “unauthorized work,” according to an alert sent through the department.
Musk had long said he might change the call, but he sped up the procedure in a tweet Sunday morning when he said “soon we will say goodbye to the Twitter logo and, gradually, to all birds. “
Earlier Monday, Musk also shared a photo of a giant X projected at Twitter’s construction in San Francisco with the caption: “Our headquarters tonight. “
The movements, which continue, are the maximum visual changes than M. Musk has performed on Twitter since striking a deal to buy the company in October. Behind the scenes, he took many steps to overhaul the company, eliminating thousands of workers and transforming the platform’s features, adding badges aimed at determining users, as well as rules governing what can and cannot be said about the service.
However, changes to the call and logo were to be ignored. In starting to remove the call from Twitter, Musk scrapped a well-established logo that had existed since 2006, when the company was founded, and that had celebrities, politicians, athletes and other users very cheerful and frustrated in equal measure. Twitter brought in its blue bird mascot in 2010 and updated it two years later.
Many Twitter users, who have spent years tweeting and strengthening their presence on the site, seemed alienated by the change. “Did everyone notice the new (eXecrable) logo?” actor Mark Hamill tweeted Monday, with the hashtag #ByeByeBirdie. Others saw this resolution as the latest blow to Musk on the site, with some stubbornly claiming they would call the site Twitter and stay “tweeting. “
When you mark verbs, it’s the “holy grail,” said Mike Proulx, Forrester’s vice president and director of studies, because it means they have a pop-culture component.
“The app itself has a cultural phenomenon in many ways,” he said. “In one fell swoop, Elon Musk necessarily removed 15 years of Twitter’s brand and is now necessarily starting from scratch. “
Musk has risked the wrath of Twitter users even if he can’t let them down. His company faces financial difficulties and increased competition, and rival Meta this month launched an app for real-time public conversations called Threads. The new app temporarily racked up a hundred million downloads in less than a week, though app usage is under surveillance.
Mike Carr, co-founder of logo company NameStormers, said Musk can be interpreted as having a sinister “Big Brother” tech overlord vibe. Unlike the blue bird, which he described as warm and tender but a bit dated and burdened by bad press, the new logo is “very difficult,” he said.
Still, he evoked words like “X marks the place” and it’s possible that only M. Musk differentiates the platform from his Twitter luggage, M said. Carr.
“If they were and it was someone other than Elon Musk, it would be a bigger threat because other people might start laughing at him,” M said. Carr, who helped find names for thousands of customers, and added used car company CarMax.
In 1999 he participated in the creation of X. com, an online bank. The company replaced its name after merging with some other startup to shape what would be PayPal.
In 2017, Musk said he bought PayPal’s X. com domain. “No plans at this time but this has wonderful sentimental feeling for me,” he tweeted at the time.
Tesla, Musk’s electric car maker, also owns a gaming app vehicle called the Model X. One of Musk’s sons, X Æ A-12 Musk, is known as X for short. The holding companies created to close the acquisition of Twitter were called X Holdings. Musk also runs a synthetic intelligence company called xAI.
“I like the letter X,” he posted Sunday.
Musk showed disdain for Twitter’s old corporate culture. He questioned the number of references to birds in calls and products from the company’s internal teams. At one point, it replaced the call for a participatory fact-checking feature with “Community Notes” from “Birdwatch. “It recently asked to cover the w on behalf of Twitter at its San Francisco headquarters.
Among those who didn’t seem bothered by the replacement of Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and former chief executive, said in a tweet Monday that while a rebranding is not “essential” to knowing M’s vision. Musk, there’s an argument in his favor.
“The Twitter logo carries a lot of baggage,” Dorsey wrote. But all those themes are the application it offers, the name. “
Martin Grasser, a San Francisco artist who was part of a team in 2011 that helped design Twitter’s newest bird logo, said he intended to convey “simplicity, brevity and clarity. “The goal was to have a logo as memorable as Apple’s or Nike’s, he said.
Grasser said Musk can do whatever he wants with the brand, but “I hope the bird occupies a place in the culture that is a satisfied memory or becomes one of the logos that belongs to the culture rather than a company. “
Ryan Mac is a generation journalist who specializes in corporate roles in the global generation industry. He won a 2020 George Polk Award for his Facebook policy and is in Los Angeles. Learn more about Ryan Mac
Tiffany Hsu is a technical journalist covering disinformation and disinformation. Learn more about Tiffany Hsu
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