Webmaster's Home (ChinaZ.com) News on July 24: Elon Musk said on Sunday that he plans to change Twitter's logo from the famous blue bird to an "X", which will be the first since The latest major change since he bought the Twitter platform last year for $44 billion.
In a series of tweets starting at 12:00 a.m. ET on July 23, Musk said he intends to make the change globally as soon as possible. "Soon, we'll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand, and gradually to all the birds," Musk wrote on his account.
The change isn't surprising given Musk's long history with the "X" name, said Alan Adamson, co-founder of marketing consultancy Metaforce. Tesla CEO Musk tweeted in October last year, "The acquisition of Twitter is an accelerator for creating X, and X is a universal application."
Musk's rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp. usually Known as SpaceX. And in 1999, Musk founded a startup called X.com, an online financial services company now known as PayPal.
"Don't know what subtle clues gave me away, but I like the letter X," Musk tweeted on Sunday.
A few hours later on Sunday, longtime NBC Universal executive Linda Yacarino, whom Musk named Twitter CEO in May, also weighed in on the move.
she wrote on her Twitter account: "It's an extremely rare thing - whether in life or business - that you get a second chance to make another great impression. Twitter Once made a huge impression and changed the way we communicate. Now, X will go even further and change the global plaza."
Jacarino tweeted that X will be "infinitely interactive The future state - centered around audio, video, messaging, payments/banking - creates a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services and opportunities."
However, on the social media platform, making changes to Twitter was met with skepticism .
Adamson said the change will be very confusing to a large portion of Twitter's vast audience, who are already unhappy with the social platform because of a series of other big changes Musk has made.
He said: "They won't get it. It's a fitting end to the stunning dismantling of an iconic brand and business." Sharp criticism that this may scare away more advertisers and weaken its cultural influence as a trendsetter.
Raising the threshold for viewing tweets is part of an $8-a-month subscription service Musk launched earlier this year to boost Twitter revenue. Revenue has plummeted since Musk took over the company and laid off about three-quarters of its workforce to cut costs and avoid bankruptcy.
Attracting advertisers has been crucial to Musk and Twitter, as many fled the social media platform in the early months after he took over, fearing damage to their brands. Advertisers are cutting spending in part because of changes Musk has made that have resulted in more objectionable content that offends a broader segment of the platform's audience. Advertisers have returned, Musk said in late April, without providing specifics.
Musk's move to change Twitter's logo to an "X" also comes as Twitter faces competition from Meta's new app, Threads, which launched earlier this month. It's seen as an alternative for those unhappy with Twitter.
Threads is billed as a text version of Meta's photo-sharing app Instagram, which the company says offers "a new, self-contained space for real-time updates and open conversation."
According to Instagram head Adam Mosseri in An article on Threads, 100 million people signed up for Threads in the first five days after the app launched.
