Overnight, the iconic blue bird icon was removed from Twitter’s desktop version and replaced with a monochromatic, bold letter X. The same change will be made to the mobile version shortly, the company confirmed.
The change is also said to signal an evolution for the brand beyond social media.
“X is the future state of limitless interactivity, focused on audio, video, messaging, payments/banking, creating a global marketplace of ideas, goods, services and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we can only begin to imagine,” tweeted Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, or rather “x’ed” Yaccarino as we’ve learned to say.
Why we care For X users, rebranding will indeed require radical changes to the familiar vocabulary. People will make an “x” instead of “tweet”. Presumably, on the mobile device, we’ll now see a list of users who have recently ‘x’d. TweetDeck will surely become XDeck, although this has yet to be confirmed.
For marketers and advertisers, the change will underscore questions already raised about brand safety. Last year, many sources pointed to significant increase in hate speech on the platform. While Meta’s Zuckerberg has talked about competitor X Threads as be “friendly”, X’s aesthetic seems inevitably minimalist, even brutalist, for example when the new logo is projected on the outside of its headquarters like a sinister version of the Bat-signal.
Musk has a long history with the letter X. He clearly likes it; Whether a wider audience will find the name and logo relatable remains to be seen.
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About the author
Kim Davis is the editorial director of MarTech Today. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim began covering business software ten years ago. His expertise includes SaaS for the enterprise, urban planning based on digital data and SaaS applications, digital technology and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a website dedicated to marketing technology, which later became a channel for established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN in 2016 as a senior editor, rising to executive editor, then editor-in-chief, a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in technology journalism, Kim was an associate editor at The Local: East Village, a New York Times hyperlocal news site, and has previously worked as an editor for an academic publication and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.
