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I recall when I was at PayPal, which owned x.com at the time, there were a few people who had x.com email addresses internally. It was considered a prestigious novelty.

I also recall pitching to various folks to use the domain as a URL shortener, but people rolled their eyes. Always felt like a missed opportunity to me, although I admit it was a kind of gimmicky idea.

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Hah that's cool. X.com could've been a bigger version of tinyurl and bitly when both were at their peak. In the bigger picture, still small stuff though like you sort of alluded to.

bit.ly for a while let you use j.mp which was even shorter than x.com. For some reason (simplifying their brand maybe?) they eventually got rid of that and now going to j.mp just gives you bit.ly URLs.

Not much demand for URL shorteners pre-twitter.

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