Twitter bird has flown and Elon Musk’s X misses the spot in several ways

tech.hindustantimes.com:

I suppose you could say changing the Twitter bird logo to an “X” makes complete sense. As the recognized icon for “make it go away,” X just about sums up the achievements of Elon Musk's social network so far.

Gone are many of Twitter's users, half of its advertisers, 80% of its employees and its operational stability. Gone is its credibility as a leading platform for following breaking news, a forum for activism and change or a place to simply get updates on whatever it is you care about.

Next up — unless this is all one big ruse, which can't be discounted — is the one thing still giving Musk's $44 billion deal for the social media site some value: the Twitter brand itself. It will now be known as X, Musk has decided. The little blue bird, famous internationally, is destined to disappear.

In a series of bewildering corporate-speak tweets on Sunday, X Chief Executive Officer Linda Yaccarino explained Musk's vision of an app offering audio, video, messaging, banking and “well… everything.” She wrote that X would be the “future state of unlimited interactivity.” (No, me neither.)

The generous take is that the Twitter brand carries a lot of baggage, as co-founder Jack Dorsey himself acknowledged Sunday, and so a fresh start might be the best way to draw a line between the old and the new.

But Musk's execution of this “rebrand” has shown that this isn't an idea that has been well thought through. The “interim” X logo looks like a piece of WordArt, created using an off-the-shelf font. The X.com domain name, for a considerable time Sunday, was just displaying a holding page for domain name registrar GoDaddy because it hadn't been configured correctly.

Musk claims to be acting on an original vision for “X” that he has had since he