The blue bird is history: Elon Musk radically remodels Twitter and has the logo replaced with an X. His goal is a “multifunctional app”. Can he convince Twitter fans and financial experts with that?
The Twitter bird is no more. Even Twitter is no more. Elon Musk’s social network has replaced the name and the famous blue bird logo. Twitter has been around since 2006 and is now called “X” under new owner Elon Musk. Musk writes: “We will gradually say goodbye to the birds.”
“I’m sad,” says Martin Grasser, a graphic designer from San Francisco. He was part of the team that created the 2012 Twitter Bird. “The bird should convey simplicity, brevity and clarity,” he says. That matched Twitter in 2012.
The last remnants
But the bird will soon no longer be attached to the company’s headquarters. Parts of the name were already removed on Monday. However, the police interrupted the unscrewing because the action was not approved. Only the “he” and the bird can be seen.
The night before, a large white “X” was projected onto the facade. Some of the conference rooms are said to have been renamed, for example they are now called “eXposure” or “eXult”. The main thing is something with an “X”.
The bird on the web has already been replaced, but traces of Twitter are still visible: Whoever enters “twitter.com” still ends up on the previous Twitter page. The top left isn’t the famous blue Twitter bird anymore, by the way his name is Larry, it’s just an X.
finance professor: “Makes no business sense”
“It’s like buying Coca-Cola and swapping out the iconic bottle without changing the product,” Joshua White, professor of finance at Vanderbilt University, told NPR. Unnecessarily replacing such a well-known brand without offering anything new makes no business sense.
The move comes as no surprise. Twitter has been part of X-Cooperation since spring. “Twitter has made a tremendous impact and changed the way we communicate,” posts former Twitter and now X CEO Linda Yaccarino. Now X will go even further.
Pay, shop, order pizza
The goal of X owner Elon Musk is a “multifunctional app”. An app that can be used to pay, shop, order a taxi or order pizza. Twitter is to be expanded for this purpose, Musk has repeatedly written. It is unclear whether this will work. The operation of the social network alone is not always stable.
“Transferring money online requires trust,” says finance professor White. “You want to be sure that the platform you’re using is secure. I think a lot of Twitter users have lost that trust.”
Musk’s fascination with the “X”
The letter “X” has long fascinated Musk. The “x.com” website, which now also leads to the ex-Twitter page, was the name of one of his startups in the late 1990s. SpaceX is the name of his space company, and the short form of one of his children’s names is “X”.
A previous tweet should no longer be called a tweet, Musk writes. Tweets are now “Xe”. On the X page, however, there is a blue button on the bottom left that says “Tweet”. It seems like so often in the last few months: not really thought through.
Graphic designer Grasser, who co-invented the blue Twitter bird, says it embodied the coming of age of the internet. “A time when – and I don’t mean to sound cynical – more people believed in the power of the internet. Like something from your teenage years that you remember but will now change and won’t be the way it was.”