It's still Twitter. There's no need to call it X unless you want to want to do free advertising for Musk's name change.
Changing the name to X was just a bad idea.
Nowadays kids only know it as the Rogers Centre and may have only heard Skydome from their parents. If X/Twitter is still around in 10 years (I’m pretty 50/50 on those odds) then I think it’ll be known officially and colloquially as X, not Twitter.
Until then calling it "twitter dot com" is still accurate.
The companies grew larger than their flagship product, so they created a new umbrella brand for the company to continue expanding with new products with their own identities.
Rather than throw out the decades of brand recognition and destroy the identity of their flagship product in order to make it serve as an umbrella for video calls or banking or whatever else is crammed into X.
Wasnt expecting that :(
Looks like nissan.com site is dead too, this is how it looked in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200608045052/https://nissan.co...
All single octet length top level domain (TLD) names are reserved.
Should the root zone ever get very large, there are technical
solutions involving referral to servers providing splits of the zone
based on the first name octet, which would be eased by having the
single byte TLDs available. In addition, these provide a potential
additional axis for DNS expansion. For like reasons, it is
recommended that within TLD zones or indeed within any zone that is
or might become very large, in the absence of a strong reason to the
contrary, all single octet names be reserved.
"Before the current reserved name policy was imposed in 1993, Jon Postel (under the IANA function) took steps to reserve all available single character letters and numbers at the second level for future extensibility of the Internet (see 20 May 1994 email from Jon Postel, https://web.archive.org/web/20100301054658/http://ops.ietf.o...)"
Although I can't find off hand where he said about the corporations but I do vaguely remember reading that at some time as well, may be wrong on that specific point though.
I want b.com because "Be dotcom!" sounded cool.
All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable
Someone else made a comparison to phone numbers which turned out to be accurate. Simple sells.
Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.
I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.
All the new TLDs removed scarcity from the system which didn’t provide any value.
Take bob.builders, it's a perfectly valid domain, but if you see it on the back of a van, even if it's www.bob.builders, it's not recognizably as a website. www.b.com has the exact same problem, even x.com / www.x.com is just weird and looks like a mistake. The one letter domains have the added issue that you have no association that might indicate where the domain will take you.
See https://x.co
Just "x" alone isn't really the brand.
It's more like "x.com" is the canonical name.
From that perspective, "x" or "x.com" is about as good as brand recognition can get. It's simple and perfectly descriptive of an "everything app" and payment processing business.
It sounds like a porn website. I don't think most business owners would want this as their brand, but I guess Elon is special in this way as well.
Twitter had one of the strongest brands. Not in social media, not in technology, just one of the strongest brands period. Do people realize how rare and difficult that is to do? That little blue bird was everywhere. Elon just gave it up. Flushed it away.
Kind of like those advertising contracts.
Believe they need to be short and easy to Google even if you don't know how to spell them (not saying the above brand names are perfect). Find it annoying hearing Xero having to be spelt out on the radio to stop people going to zero.com.
Not particularly a fan of combining two English words together like Facebook, Freetrade, GitHub etc. but the worst is when companies try to own a common word like Apple.
I jest but those Firaxis guys must be eager to do something about this whole thing before twitter blew up. Its around the time for the third installment of the reboot.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/05/x-is-now-licensed-for-paym...
I don't know that it is self-evident.
The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/
It doesn't change the fact that it looks a bit weird.
I think any domain that is shorter than it's tld looks a bit funky and requires a second look to process that it is real.
> The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/
I know way more about the inner mechanics of X11 than the average Linux user (which is saying something), but if you had asked me in a different context what x.org pointed to, I would have had no idea. (And then would have said, "oh, right" as soon as you told me the answer).
That's the tell-tale sign of a bad branding decision. I'm not going to fault X too much for that since they literally predate the Web[0], and because they're targeting a very specialized audience, but any mainstream company that makes the same mistake in 2023 deserves whatever criticism they get for it.
[0] The foundation itself doesn't, but the underlying projects do, and the foundation was formed as a merger so it depends on where you choose to start the clock.
Most people google everything. A significant number of people google "google" in their browser's search/URL-bar to get to Google.com and search for whatever site they could have gone to directly. Builder Bob isn't going to change the average user's behavior in navigating the web.
You're going to walk around calling your local construction company "bobbuilder.com"? That's a weird vibe for a business that takes place offline. And it doesn't matter because people will still google "bob builder"
> There's a reason amazon decided to refer to itself as amazon.com until everyone got it, and that probably saves them billions in google ads per year.
OK but they still buy all the top ad spots for "amazon" and "amazon.com"
2. Even if people know they want amazon.com, they're still going to search for amazon.com instead of figure out where the url bar is.
Today they do. When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s, people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering.
It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books, along with the occasional “new phone, who dis?”
This was the case well into the 2000s, if I recall correctly, and even into the mid-late 2010s, when URL shorteners proliferated to manage the complicated URLs generated by Google Forms etc.
What's odd about that? I didn't really understand your comment.
Otherwise you are correct that it doesn't really matter. The main value of gTLDs is that we ran out of decent available .coms a while ago.
Single letter domains look cool (I guess) and signal that the org has the money to buy a premium domain. Similar to "mortgage.com"
They are, yes, and it's not exactly new news although the better word would be "pointless" (they're not exactly worthless since some people do pay for them).
Twitter was already one of the most male-dominated social media (especially outside the US), I think it would be interesting to see the evolution now that this became X. I'd bet a huge majority of new joiners are male (due yo the branding change), and a small majority of 'leaver' are female.
It's crazy to me that they didn't buy i.com in the early days.
My email address is first@last.me - I now automatically say "no .com" or similar. Too many CS experiences where "we can't find your email address" "try first@last.me.com" "Oh, there it is".
I’d like to call it something different, and since many people say “x/twitter”, I guess others have similar thoughts.
I’m not unhappy that there are few other single letter domains, especially if they were to be claimed by corporations.
> Popularity continued to climb and Alexa was ranked in the top 100 in the mid-1990s. According to the Social Security Administration, its highest popularity, 39th, was achieved in 2006. The name's popularity decreased rapidly after Amazon picked it as the wake word of its voice service Amazon Alexa, which was released worldwide in 2016.
More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/p...
X is not a word.
Coincidence ?
I have far less confidence that x.com links will continue to work for years than twitter.com links.
Just like Prince.
> This wasn’t so much of a problem when Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC—lots of us already called it that
https://slate.com/business/2004/05/what-does-kfc-stand-for-n...
Twitter has always been Twitter
> This seems weird as the domain was sold in 2014 for 6.8M USD, which would be around 8.9M USD today taking inflation into account.
Caught my attention, 30% inflation in just 9 years...
When domain names became big business, those rules were changed.
Another old rule is that the domain name could not start with a digit.
He's been looking for an excuse to use it ever since paypal.
its an honest mistake, please forgive me.