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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has managed to get so many words to be common. Like it's a "tweet", not "a post on facebook". It's a "retweet" or "quote tweet", not "something I shared on facebook". Why throw all this deep brand recognition away?

It's like people say "google it", and google suddenly changing the name of their search.

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I feel like "to google something" has by now become a generic term that means just to search on the web, not necessarily using Google. In particular, in Russian, I've heard people say "загуглить в яндексе", literally "to google in Yandex".

By the same token, the users of XXX dot com will probably still refer to their posts as tweets. Though as OP points out, "tweet" isn't genericized like kleenex or google, so it is less likely to survive the sudden brand shift.

Why did yandex change to dzen BTW?

No one quite understands that. But if you want just the search, there's ya.ru.

However, in Russia, Yandex is not just a search engine. It does everything and then some — search, cloud storage, email, maps & navigation, music streaming, a voice assistant with Amazon-Echo-like speakers, news, online advertising, event tickets, a marketplace, taxi, food delivery a-la Uber Eats, car sharing, online grocery store, e-scooter rentals in major cities, and this list goes on and on. And that Dzen ad-filled cringy blogging thing no one seems to like. But Yandex is literally inescapable, it's everywhere and you'd be somewhat excluding yourself from the society if you refuse to use any of their services.

"I xed it." the new verb sounds like using a dodgy porn site.

Ironically it sounds like the alternate pronouns he hates so much.

His new pronouns are he/him/x

Oh surely no one would mistake watching an X video with some other service[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XVideos

"Can you give me a re-x on my x please?"

Sounds like a drug addict looking for another dose

It sounds the same with "tweet". "Tweet" is a dumb name too, it's just normalized.

> It sounds the same with "tweet".

May be in certain cultures. I have never made that connect. I am from India.

I wonder how the people who work there enjoy being called X-employees.

You're X-acerbating the issue.

Isn't that drinking a pint all at once? Now there will be a copyright charge for drinking your favourite bewerage all at once.

Musk xed [axed] Twitter.

Sounds plausible to me.

Or what the annihilist embodiment-of-evil antagonists in a Madeline l'Engle novel do.

(See _A Wind in The Door_ or _A Swiftly Tilting Planet_)

There are probably hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites out there that have the twitter bird logo at the bottom either to direct link people to share the article or maybe a link to the profile of the author or whatever.

They are never going to change to the X logo.

They will. It wasn't their bird logo. They'll get a new image and url.

Aren’t those little share buttons served via a CDN or third party anyway? All you need to do is swap out the image that the URL points to and any site that uses that URL suddenly starts serving the new image.

In a perfect world, yes. But I'm pretty sure the majority of websites uses something that isn't quite "off the shelf".

How they're implemented depends from site to site. But for many sites, they would need to be changed manually if Twitter changes its name and/or logo.

Elob has a fixiation on the letter. As I understand it, he wants to create a 'meta' platform for everything. I think in China such platforms exist (?). It's not to far away to say, that you need a 'meta' name for a platform like that. Probably wants to leave the 'private company' image and try to create an 'institution'. I hope it fails.

WeChat is extremely popular in China and on the surface it's a messaging app but below that is a whole swath of stuff, the most interesting IMO is the decentralized marketplace. My GF's mom is Chinese and she buys tons of stuff like vegetables and housewares from random people through the app.

People pay for rent and various bills, you can call their version of Uber, order food etc.

If Twitter is going to pull this off they should invest heavily in the DMing UX as messaging is the real interface for this stuff. Almost like a terminal with some extra UIs layered on top.

Thanks for the explanation of the 'direct message' aspect. I didn't know that, but it's interesting

WeChat's success lies in chinese culture that people value convenience over privacy bc the gov can already monitor everything its citizen do. It is a "Super App", a mini OS with conglomerate of apps that has everything users need. Without ever leaving the app, it drastically lowers learning curve for people. Instead of learning how to use multiple apps, they need to only learn just one.

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-app

I mean, you can also buy stuff on WhatsApp... But honestly, Twitter V2, or, well, X, looks more to me Facebook. Twitter was twitter for its simplicity.

Remember when everyone got pissed off because they doubled the characters? How many is on Twitter now, 5000? Markdown support too. And now they are planning banking, latex, some linkedin copy cat stuff...

In reality twitter is trying to become Facebook. Facebook only didn't had banking because FED/EU didn't liked the Libra idea.

Eh, it's simpler than that - X.com was his first company, that became Paypal, that he was ousted from.

This is just basic old man 101: trying to regain the glory days of your youth.

I mean, it'd be already pretty simple ... Make an app that covers several areas of peoples lifes and bring it all under one hood.

Some might call that “an operating system”

I suspect his glory days are right now.

I like Elon, I think he is smart. I also think he has too much power and influence. And along with that comes corruption, non sense and slew of other negative attributes.

I think I'm going to call the site X/Twitter now. Pronounced: ex-twitter.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Twitter, is in fact, X/Twitter, or as I've recently taken to calling it, X plus Twitter. Twitter is not a social media unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning X system made useful by the X corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full as defined by X.

Owners are kinda crazy. Go to relentless.com. It's the preferred name for amazon. Bezos got talked down from the ledge by his partners at he time.

the best meme I have seen so far, is musk has out Gavin Belson'ed, Gavin Belson.

That was his idea for the name at the start though, rather than a rebrand.

I think "Relentless" isn't terrible, but "Amazon" is vastly better for international branding.

Perhaps they call it X because of what comes after: why?

And then "zzzzz" when the fanboys jump in to justify

Xcrete and reXcrete

X is full of Xcrement

They can still say "tweet." I don't "goog" on google, I search on google. Also, the site isn't called "tweeter."

exactly my thought. the stupidity of it, renaming something that had become part of the every day slang.

This is a very good point!

x it

when a word becomes too common it risks losing its trademark though

Good luck trade marking X

Or the logo, which is a unicode character: 𝕏 https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D54F

You would be surprised how accommodating US trademarks are, like how you can't make pink insulation because it's "owned" by Owens Corning.

Ohio State University trademarked the "THE" in certain contexts: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ohio-state-university-o...

Thats's only when applied to things outide twitter, which I don't think it's the case. I have never heard anyone talk about retweeting on facebook or whatever. The fact they don't do this would make their brand even more valuable

It's pretty simple to avoid that. And no one really talks about Tweeting outside the context of Twitter, which made Twitter's job way easier than say Google's, where something like "I googled you on Bing" has become an acceptable and common turn of phrase.

Surely "I googled you on Bing" is only ever said with lashings of irony? I've never heard anyone use that phrase in any serious way.

Certainly not together like that, but I've definitely mentioned googling something when I actually used the brave default search engine.

Being common has nothing to do with it. “FedEx” and “Coke” are common.

The issue is when it becomes generic which is a difference concept.

Coke is arguably generic across large portions of the USA: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-vs-pop_n_2103764

One of the most common exchanges I heard growing up in north Central Texas:

"What kind of coke do you want?" "Dr. Pepper"

I grew up in Houston and this was a common question (and answer) to the point where all the midwesterners in college arguing about “soda” vs “pop” just thought us Texans were crazy.

Ahh yes, like the incredibly un-common Letter X.

Ahh yes, like the incredibly un-common letters of the alphabet.

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