X

It’s hard to shake the notion it’s broken beyond repair now.

Might try Bluesky (if I can get an invite), might just give up…

Might try Bluesky (if I can get an invite), might just give up…

I gave up, it just seemed easier.

Are all the Musk fanboys still fapping themselves raw over his genius?

@soundninjauk Yes, looks that way.

@thecaptain Of course they are.

I just went on it. Only thing I read annoyed me, so I responded and left. Did notice that the only thing that had changed was the opening logo. Everything else says “retweet” “Search Twitter” etc. so an excellent rebranding job there.
Heard on the news that Elon Musk had done it. He should maybe get some tech bods in next time.

best bit of all is that he tried to take the word twitter off the front of the building and he got stopped halfway through by the local Calif council because he didn’t get a permit for the cherrypicker 😀 he really is a **** with no critical thinking skills

I’m on the most up to date (actually Beta) version of the Android app – it still has the blue bird logo and it’s still called Twitter.

Last week I went as far as deleting the Twitter app from my phone. Quite a turn around for someone who used to be a daily user. He had to break the culture, the technical workings, and the experience to get rid of me, but he managed all three. Killing the brand after pushing ardent users away is just the cherry on the cake of shit.

If his plan was to completely destroy the company because of how it acted towards Trump and Covid, then he’s succeeding. If he genuinely is trying to make it work… then it would be wise for everyone to avoid any product from any company where he has any kind of steer on what they do in future. I know I will be.

It’s hard to shake the notion it’s broken beyond repair now.

It seems to be working the same as it always did.

It’s hard to shake the notion it’s broken beyond repair now.

It seems to be working the same as it always did.

These can both be true.

Used to be able to view twitter without an account but only ever get a sign-up landing page now. Not bothered enough to sign up, it’s only mildly irritating as I never liked the platform in the first place. It always seemed a bit like it points to content, but you never find the content, only more pointers to pointers.

Bluesky seemingly doesn’t have the grunt to accept more users, Threads will have it buried in no time unless someone takes a punt and gives them a lot of resources.

Was listening to a podcast yesterday that pointed out Twitter was knackered even before Musk took over. They were losing money everywhere and just weren’t sustainable. Add them to the long list, even Meta seem to be acknowledging that Facebook is dead/dying now, it used to be front and centre but is now just an afterthought.

Facebook would be less dead if people’s timelines weren’t full of ‘You might like…’ rather than stuff from people they know.

Wasn’t Twitter’s financial situation one of the reasons they were so keen to sell?

Wasn’t Twitter’s financial situation one of the reasons they were so keen to sell?

They werent keen to sell initially until he offered way over the market value and so the board would potentially have got in trouble for rejecting it.

The X logo looks a bit weak, theres also lots of other apps called X or similar

1 app for everything sounds like a good idea, IF musk pulls it off would be amazing, but surely he’d have to hire a LOT of staff to make that work

Twitter itself, Im finding it increasingly harder to see stuff I am interested in, just seem to have a lot of nonsense appear, facebook is not much better

it was profitable in 2018 and 2019, they went on a massive COVID hiring binge (along with mostly everyone else in bigtech) so saw a big jump in costs. Said profit wasnt anything like the kind of numbers that would justify its valuation at the time, but still, the narrative that twitter never made money is not true.

apologies for missing the folks that already posted the unicode thing

Damn, they can’t even get a building sign removed properly…

Facebook would be less dead if people’s timelines weren’t full of ‘You might like…’ rather than stuff from people they know.

Probably no-one you know is making any content on Facebook! It’s been abandoned or back-burnered.

https://t.co/1Y612yl1CR pic.twitter.com/lMZWAUCtYt

— Marie Le Conte (@youngvulgarian) July 24, 2023

https://twitter.com/youngvulgarian/status/1683459955356053509

Shirley a ‘tweet’ from X should be a X-creet… 💩

Which would explain the response from their PR dept. (or whatever it used to be called), no?

💩

My browser now has a Xtwitter tab. Is that pronounced “skitter”?

best bit of all is that he tried to take the word twitter off the front of the building and he got stopped halfway through by the local Calif council because he didn’t get a permit for the cherrypicker 😀

Please, please tell me it now says “Twit”

My browser now has a Xtwitter tab. Is that pronounced “skitter”?

I vote for Xitter, with the X pronounced as in the Chinese “Xie Xie”

Excellent! then you should have a voting system instead of “Likes” on Xcreets – “up” and “down”. So good ones take it up the Xitter, bad ones go down… you get it. 😀

Which would explain the response from their PR dept. (or whatever it used to be called), no?

Public ridicule department?

Elon Musk’s decision to turn Twitter into X wiped out anywhere between $4 billion and $20 billion in value, according to analysts and brand agencies https://t.co/3UJ5Ao6FBy

— Bloomberg Markets (@markets) July 25, 2023

Xcreets is a winner.

Someone also pointed out that any video on the platform must be an “Xvideo”.

I’m sure that won’t have any negative implications.

Bluesky seemingly doesn’t have the grunt to accept more users, Threads will have it buried in no time unless someone takes a punt and gives them a lot of resources.

Bluesky is very much in Beta.
Threads is very much in Meta.

Last week I went as far as deleting the Twitter app from my phone. Quite a turn around for someone who used to be a daily user.

Me too @kelvin . . . before all this ‘X’ nonsense started.  Was finding a lot of the chat on there pretty negative and Insta suits me better as I don’t read, I just look at the pictures 😉

Incidentally, anyone know how to remove my (dead) Twitter link from my profile here and replace it with Insta?

Someone also pointed out that any video on the platform must be an “Xvideo”.

People complaining that ‘X.com’ sounded like a porn site was one of the reasons he was forced out of PayPal when he tried to rebrand that, IIRC

So tying in with that, I saw a thing on reddit and ended up in a bit of an interesting conversation with a musk fan, and it reminded me of some pretty relevant history… Storytime!

All started out with this guy saying “Musk’s company x.com became paypal”. And I was like, yeah, well kinda but no. So, back in the 90s Musk was one of the founders of X.com, which was an early internet bank. Actually quite a cool thing, but it was arguably ahead of its time, there wasn’t much market for the core product yet, people wanted internet banking but they wanted a high street bank that did internet stuff, not a bank that was only on the internet. At about the same time, Confinity launched a product called Paypal.

Confinity’s product Paypal was almost entirely just a wallet and transmission service, pretty much as it is today though very limited in use. Much smaller goals than x.com, but, it turned out that the wallet-and-transmission service was going to be a really big deal, actually far bigger than an internet bank at that time. I don’t think even they realised that, x.com certainly didn’t.

I was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago- I was a really early ebay user in I think late 97, back in the Beanie Baby days before there was an ebay.co.uk, because I was really into trading card games. To start with I was just buying stuff for myself but I noticed there were big differences between the US and UK markets so I started reselling, just buying dusty stock of games that were unsuccesful in the sates but big here and likewise, made a nice wee side income as a student and wasted every penny. But, back then paying for stuff on ebay was an incredible pain in the arse if you weren’t in the US, there was no usable credit card handling so I was literally getting my bank to print out US dollar banker’s drafts then posting them, or just sending dollar bills in the post, or I had a mate in Florida that would handle stuff for me sometimes but he was a bit worried about the ever so slightly tax fraudey nature of my genius business deals.

So I found this scam-looking paypal thing, which worked great with ebay.com but wasn’t as territorial. I had to do a wee bit of fraud with my Florida dude Ori’s help to open my account, but after that it was just amazing. (I’m still using the same account which is why if you buy stuff from me off the classifieds here it’ll ask if you want to send dollars) But even then, paypal was paypal.

Aaanyway, x.com was struggling to attract users, because despite being potentially a far bigger thing, there just wasn’t much of a market yet. Paypal was doing great, because it was just a simple service not trying to be anything bigger but had found a totally new market, proper disruptive stuff that nobody like Western Union saw coming. X.com’s service had the capacity to do the same but wasn’t pushing it or streamlining it, so they belatedly tried to break into that market, using really aggressive predator tactics to try and take custom from paypal. But, they still wanted to be a whole bank. I remember they offered me some pretty good cash amount, like a whole $100 or something, just to transfer but I couldn’t open the account because I wasn’t in the states, bummer. You couldn’t just use it to pay your ebay dudes, you had to do the whole bank thing.

They did get a reasonable market share, never really threatened paypal, but it was a big enough attack to be really troublesome for paypal who were still a small business and were really worried about losing momentum or having one of the real banks do the same thing and annihilate them. So in early 2000, they agreed to an equal merger, and the new company became x.com, purely because Confinity was a rubbish name. Paypal was still Paypal of course.

Musk was the biggest single shareholder, and became the first CEO of this new x.com. Mostly just because he was the dominant leader of X.com as was, while Creality was more of a partnership, so he was the biggest voice. Aaaand, as CEO he was still an old x.com guy, still obsessed with the internet bank thing, and undermining the operation of the paypal product. He tried to rebrand paypal as x.com, despite market research telling them that X.com just didn’t really mean anything, and people thought it sounded like something to do with the sex industry. Chased out Bill Harris who was champion of Paypal. And so on. Basically the wrong man for the job, he never really seemed to understand til the end that x.com wasn’t the winner in this fight and that he was supposed to be pushing Paypal. Maybe just because they’d used his name, or because he was the CEO and that meant he must have won, or maybe just because he was sure he’s an unstoppable genius and everyone else is a fool, or something. Even today he talks about how Paypal wasted the opportunity by ditching banking and just doing the payments thing that made them so massive. Anyway.

So, after a bit he was persuaded to focus on Paypal but it was too late- shareholders united behing Peter Thiel and… well, savagely stabbed Musk in the back tbf, he went off on a joint late honeymoon and business trip in late 2000 and when he came back he’d been ousted. And from there on, it was pretty plain sailing for Paypal- they changed the company name to Paypal, aligned the whole company behind that product, killed everything that remained of X.com- apparently it wasn’t even worth selling off at that point. In 2002 Paypal went public, and was aquired by ebay for $1.5bn.

And that’s how Musk got incredibly stupidly rich, because after he’d failed as CEO, Thiel led Paypal to financial vastness and Musk was still the single biggest shareholder, from his $12m investment in the original x.com. It’s not that he was a business failure as some say, X.com and zip2 were both really clever moves, but it took someone else to make him a gazillionaire.

Anyway, for some reason that stuff all came to mind when I was thinking about rebranding things to X, and being a disruptive business genius who can’t be told what to do. Just, this time there’s no Peter Thiel waiting in the wings to take his toys away. But there are plenty of simps who will tell you what a genius he was inventing paypal.

All X-plained below by behind the bastards podcast

Now I understand what Elon’s thinking.

I think it's a TERRIBLE idea. The world's moved on. He's doing the tech equivalent of drunk-DMing his highschool girlfriend to tell her she's still hot.

But you can see the origins now. He thinks this is the genius idea that got away. And that this time nobody can coup him.

— John Bull (@garius) July 25, 2023

It’s the master plan of X billionaire Elon Musk.

I think that deserves a round of applause! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🎩

Logs into X, first post seen is this…

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FFS

I know my 23 followers will be devastated, but between this ‘X’ nonsense, and suddenly finding The Daily Mash behind a paywall I can’t be doing with it anymore and have deleted my account. I hope Elon will ne able to cope with the loss.

Probably no-one you know is making any content on Facebook! It’s been abandoned or back-burnered.

The problem started when Facebook stopped being a novel way to see your friends from school’s holiday pics and just became a platform for “content creators” and advertisers.

99.9999someting% of the content creators are just clickbait and listicles. Of the handful of ‘content creators’ I followed, I figured out I could be retro and subscribe to their e-mail list, get the same content, and not have facebook serve me 50 other stories and videos of puppies in-between them.

Actual LOL at the Sugababes gag.

From my professional POV, monitoring follower numbers for a medium-large sized UK company, every SM channel goes up every week apart from Twitter. That has dropped every week since Musk bought it, on every line of business. I’m sure this is people quitting their accounts.

Regarding FB being dead, I’ve found a quick stat:

Facebook reported $23.1 billion net profit in 2022, a decline on the $39.3 billion made in 2021. Meta has invested heavily into the metaverse, which is cutting into its profits.

So even with Zuck going all in on an even-more-terrible idea than Musk’s Twitter rebrand (the Metaverse) and the post-Covid tech contraction, FB is still comfortably in the black.

Bit more info here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-65410293

FB is still comfortably in the black.

But for how long? I’ve always been more of a consumer than a content generator on FB – going there to see what friends are up to. But it seems to be in a rapid spiral downwards – real people bothering to post less, nonsense suggestions and clickbait put in front of me increasing, so people visit less, so friends bother to post less and so the trend continues. My personal tipping point has been reached. I think the only real reason to have it on my phone now is that’s where my kayak club posts news and get togethers. Other than that….what’s the point – I’ve seen more cat videos that anyone really needs in their life already! I can’t be alone in thinking like this.

I really can’t get my head round the idea of including banking with Twitter. It’s not the kind of platform where I’m chatting with pals/ family or looking to buy stuff so I can’t imagine why having an account in there would be of any use. Anyone with a better imagination than me and/or experiecnce of WeChat able to enlighten?

It seems madness to do the rebrand without actualy being in the position to offer all the additional services that Musk is taling about a ‘everything’  app as having.