But of a tangent, but: every
time I see a link to an X post, I’m finding it increasingly weird that the Twitter -> X rename happened with a big splash some time ago now, but the actual x.com domain is still redirecting to twitter.com rather than the other way around.
It's simple professionalism. X is its name. Quite disheartening to constantly see the pull towards unprofessionalism just because the target is an other. Your own integrity should be pulling you to represent yourself correctly. It should have nothing to do with your external feelings towards the thing. And especially have nothing to do with your desire to hurt something.
Maybe the company is called X now, but the product is still at twitter.com, and calls itself that on many of its pages. There's nothing unprofessional about sticking to the name the product identifies itself by, and I think that would be a lot more professional for a news organisation than leading the way for a name change. That's not their job.
What the hell does it have to do with musk? If a corporation changes its name, journalists usually use the new name. Especially for big corporations. Do you want them to not use the new (very stupid) name, just to... own the musk?
Companies usually do the name change correctly.. This is more like the artist who should always have been referred to as Prince. Telling people about the other name isn't an updated reference it is a lost reference.
I’m not so sure. Time marches on. There was a time in Toronto when everyone called it the Skydome and said it always would be.
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.
Their goals are all the same. Google and Facebook did it right, Elon did it wrong.
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.
I worked at Network Solutions more than 20 years ago (before the Verisign merger) and the lore they shared with me was that when the Domain Name System was first created they didn’t know if it would scale and reserved the single-letter domains (except the few that had already been registered) in case they needed to partition the namespace – like putting Microsoft under .m.i.com or maybe .f.t.com
Do you have a citation for that?. I found a source for my claim above:
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.
> Only three of the 26 possible single-letter domains have ever been registered under the .com domain, all before 1992. The other 23 single-letter .com domain names were registered January 1, 1992 by Jon Postel, with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the alphabet.
LOL. I should have tried to get it. I spent a significant amount of time from like 93-96 trying to persuade NSF/NS to let me register b.com and e.com and came pretty close at one point. I should have thought about b.org!
I remember around 1999 when I used to work for a big ISP and I ran a simple perl script that would "nslookup" all combination of 3 letters domains. It generated a huge list of available domains, but none that called my attention because all the good ones (not just random letters) seemed to be already registered. I would never thought that all those random 3 letter domains would sell for so much money many years later! :-)
I'm missed out on a bunch of profitable tech booms just by a combination of being lazy and by feeling that things like domain scalping are somewhat inherently immoral.
If it's any consolation, it was only profitable because not enough people thought to squat on them so enough of them were turned into sites that made the web interesting enough to become massively popular. I tell myself such things, anyway. :)
I prefer the term "Domain Scalper". As it so happens, domain squatting is a legal term and it refers to buying the domain of a registered trademark just to sell it to the owner of the trademark. It doesn't even have a good resolution rate either.
Because of exorbitant price set by the registry. After the apps boom, domain name has lost half of it’s value. And, rest was messed up by the new TLDs.
I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.
This sounds like a good thing though. The high price makes squatting unviable so domains are left unregistered and available for someone who will actually use them.
All the new TLDs removed scarcity from the system which didn’t provide any value.
One letter domains has the same issue as many of the gTLDs, they aren't particularly useful in terms of brand recognition. X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.
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.
No, I disagree with the idea that one letter domains look wrong. Especially with the many new TLDs, more often than not short URL services use single character domains. Take g.co for example—google uses that in ads everywhere. It’s modern equivalent of calling a short code phone number unrecognizable. But yet most people still instinctively know how to text them for information. However for really esoteric TLDs, I can see why it would be more of a problem, not because the length of the domain, but that the TLD, like .jobs, just doesn’t sound right.
When I see a t.co (x.co now?) link I have literally no idea where it's going to take me at all and I am far, far less likely to click one of them knowing that it's a url shortener. This is such a common thing that there are browser extensions/slack(discord/teams/etc) options to unfurl urls.
Exactly. I think it also teaches people to trust all kinds of obscure domains instead of trusting only well known ones. It might be even easier to write the little bit longer domain as you don't have to double check correct spelling. Browser will likely fill it in anyway. I just don't see any real benefit.
That's actually surprisingly cheap. I used to be at a 4 letter .com and we paid over $1mil for it in 2015 back when domains were still worth something.
> X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.
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.
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.
Maybe he did it for the lol's, or to own his political opponents, or maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into. All of which sound just like him.
Rockets don't fly and electric cars don't drive if they aren't built right, which puts a floor on the IQ of the man who is that involved and hands-on with it. Being early in a major startup is a big deal, never mind a whole string of them.
He may or may not be weird or an asshole but he sure ain't stupid.
EDIT: I've been on the fence about this guy ever since I read his most recent biography, but it's really hilarious how saying something even remotely positive about him brings out an crowd who is enraged at his very being and the notion that such a thing as competence might exist.
If he did it for the lols of for "owning the libs" he would have told us way back then.
He did it because he thinks the x looks cool, SpaceX, Tesla model X, even his son is called X.
He just didn't realized or didn't care that it would kill the amazing brand it had before.
That, just after making the mistake of overpaying for twitter while trying to fool around with a buy he didn't even want to make, makes him not very smart.
If that doesn't convince you lots of his proposals for innovative tech are bs.
From single line underground tunnels for cars instead of just using more efficient trains, designing a stupid submarine to rescue the kids trapped in the Tham Luang cave as a PR stunt and then calling a pedophile the expert diver who called him out on it. There is probably more. I mean he doesn't even understand the costs of running a page as big as wikipedia so I wouldn't want him near my rockets if I worked for spaceX.
Well, the previous owners of Twitter are laughing with him, all the way to the bank.
>to own his political opponents
I don't see how throwing away a brand does that.
>maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into
Again, I don't see how that's possible. What he locked himself into was buying Twitter at a stupid price. After he did that he could have simply kept Twitter as it was, which was what he paid for. If he was just going to remake Twitter into something completely different there was no need to buy it at all. He could have just built X from the start. You could argue that what he bought was Twitter's userbase, but that userbase exists because Twitter is the way it is, and there's no guarantee that it'll stick around once Musk finishes turning Twitter into X.
> Rockets don't fly and electric cars don't drive if they aren't built right, which puts a floor on the IQ of the man who is that involved and hands-on with it
Agree! So what does it have to do with Musk?
Also, I really wouldn’t call someone smart who literally forced himself into buying a company out of ego for much more than its worth. I wouldn’t call someone smart who did that with a car or whatever, let alone that amount of money. Then firing all the people without realizing that won’t fly that easily in Europe. Then all the bullshit he tried to do around the takeover (lines of code, having twitter explained to him, etc) - like I thought he is at least okay at being a web developer given paypal.. but nope, also a fraud there.
He is at the very least just a dumb narcissistic lucky guy who got dealt a good hand of cards, at worst is actively malicious.
It's wild that you think he had no positive input with any of his successful technical startups.
Have you considered that x.com might have been an impulse buy (at the market rate, I might add). He could set $40b on fire and still be one of the richest people in history.
I also don't get the hate around that site - it's still very much up and running.
Maybe this site hates him because he trimmed a ton of fat in Twitter's engineering department. Maybe people on the left hate him because he's living proof that some people are just competent. People on the right used to hate him because he's anti-oil. Maybe the tallest trees just catch the most wind.
How do you know if any of the startups succeeded because of/irrespective/or despite him?
Just as a fact: his only technical contribution to teslas is the design of the goddamn rearview mirror. There are plenty of (unconfirmed) accounts of having to deliberately present information to elon a certain way so he will accept the decision made by the experts, which while I don’t know how true, seems surprisingly plausible, given his personality.
Also, being the richest person doesn’t mean that $40b in immediate hard cash is not a big hit. Most of this evaluation is very transient, e.g. the evaluation of tesla shares (which are very overvalued right now — is it really worth more than all the top 3 car companies together? When they sell orderS of magnitude more cars?)
There are plenty of “fans” of him here, as this libertarian view is quite popular among the startup community. With all due respect, this “on the left” comment is just braindead.
> Just as a fact: his only technical contribution to teslas is the design of the goddamn rearview mirror. There are plenty of (unconfirmed) accounts of having to deliberately present information to elon a certain way so he will accept the decision made by the experts, which while I don’t know how true, seems surprisingly plausible, given his personality.
First of all, how do you know this. Where you a fly on the wall for the entire life of Tesla Inc? This is supremely implausible.
Second, why are you willing to believe that good decisions can be made by "the experts", but if it's a rich, brash person you don't like, they can't possibly be "an expert"?
> Also, being the richest person doesn’t mean that $40b in immediate hard cash is not a big hit. Most of this evaluation is very transient, e.g. the evaluation of tesla shares
He didn't even buy the whole thing himself; he has partners in it with him.
> (which are very overvalued right now — is it really worth more than all the top 3 car companies together? When they sell orderS of magnitude more cars?)
Tesla might be overvalued, but selling "orders of magnitude more cars" is actually a drawback if you can't do so profitably.
> Second, why are you willing to believe that good decisions can be made by "the experts", but if it's a rich, brash person you don't like, they can't possibly be "an expert"?
This is not an american movie where the boss can change the tide of the whole company by just being so damn good. Reality is also not about CEOs bullshitting why are they so productive with their yoga-10min sleep-whatever diet, working 40 hours in 24. Both tesla and spacex require actual hard engineering knowledge and experience, which elon thoroughly lacks. Like, even if he would be super-human intelligent, these are (and most fields are like this) so specialized, that he couldn’t contribute in a useful manner. Let alone with his actual capabilities, which are thoroughly lacking.
- Have you interviewed Elon? You have great insight into his "actual" capabilities, as well as his "actual engineering knowledge and experience", not to mention his sleep schedule.
- Do you think there's no value in technical leadership?
- Why do you think progress can be made by many correct decisions at the detailed level made by many engineers, but not by a few correct decisions at the high level made by an engineering leader?
- Do you honestly, honestly believe the only thing he contributed to was the rear-view mirror because that's his only patent?
(by the way, that's exactly the kind of joke that he would love)
- Has it occurred to you that he did not file a patent application for every single thing he did?
- Or that he certainly had a directing influence in almost every aspect of those cars?
- Or that his main contribution is creating the business and factory system that makes the cars?
There's a lot to criticize about this man, and all other people who do things on a big scale, but it really looks like 99.9% of the criticism is just mindless, directionless hate.
> Do you think there's no value in technical leadership
There is. But people wash it together with technical expertise, which is very different. And I’m not convinced of any of these in case of elon. Just look at bullshit like the hyperloop - a kid can realize have utterly bullshit that “idea” is.
> Has it occurred to you that he did not file a patent application for every single thing he did?
Yeah, that’s definitely what his personality would dictate.. narcissistic people would definitely not market themselves that way. Only through literally buying the “founder” title of a company that wasn’t even started by him.
Now you claim that he had a directing influence on almost every aspect - may I ask you where you get this information from?
I think his smallest problem is just being a conman selling this self-made billionaire image, while not being particularly bright in the first place. The real problem is his push for right wing propaganda (presumably for lower taxes) on twitter, but even previously, or licking putin’s ass, etc. These are another kind of moral failing, on which I can happily judge him on.
not that I'm exactly hopeful or that I think this indicates wisdom in Elon's move, or that he will be successful, but it -would- be good to have a social media site that isn't advertising supported, so that the users aren't the product. Aren't we always on about that on this site?
Tesla models S 3 X Y, SpaceX is homonymous with space-sex, and yet you think x.com wasn't meant to sound like a porn site? Musk clearly has a thing for 12yo jokes.
I personally like brand names that _look_ like they could be words, but aren't like Spotify, Twitter, Monzo, Reddit, Google etc.
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.
Did you mean X-COM, the 1994 turn based game? Or XCOM, the 2012 reboot of the same game?
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.
X.org is maybe not in the same bucket as X.com. x.org is very tech oriented and the people who visit that site are much more likely to appreciate the unusual domain.
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.
And then your competitor advertises for "bob builder". And then you start whining about how mean google is, even though you were the one who decided to use google as a domain resolution service, which it was not intended for. 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.
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.
Yeah, that sucks but it is the current state of the world. Trademark registration would help.
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"
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?”
> 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
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.
I can email mike@somedomain.com but I can't "call" or "text" mike@somedomain.com . You can kinda sorta see this now with imessage / facetime, but that's not consistent and implemented in a standard protocol.
Okay, but then one letter domains and new gTLDs are worthless. If the domain doesn't really matter why not then get bobbuilder365q.com (or some other TLD that's cheaper).
".com" looks professional and, more importantly, it very clearly communicates "this is a website address." If it were "bobbuilder.services" it could be a website, but maybe it's an instagram handle or something else.
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"
> Okay, but then one letter domains and new gTLDs are worthless
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).
X.com probably makes sense in the assumption that he turns Twitter into a WeChat clone as kinda 'everything app' which would obviously fail. But as 'everything app' X is kinda a strong brand IMO.
I'm not sure. It's very tech-nerd (like me) and tech-bro oriented. The logo as well, I'm pretty sure it please the aestetics of tech bros, but at least some nerds/geek find it stupid, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't bring a lot of new female users.
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.
If "X" can transition to a WeChat clone, then maybe, until then it's a shitty brand. The media always needs to present is as: "The social media platform X", "X, formerly Twitter" or "Elon Musks X". The last one seems to indicate the Elon Musk is a bigger brand than "X".
> 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
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 think this was true years ago, but now that the general public is internet aware, a billboard with B.com or Z.com would work just fine. In Asia they don't put the .com or .whatever on the ads, they just put the brand name and the general public know to search for that term.
Maybe, I find that people are still surprised when they need my email and it's just <firstname>@<lastname>.net and not @hotmail.com / @gmail.com or something like that.
Looks like the regular symbols of a Masonic Lodge [1] so probably part of Free Masonry. I did work once for an affiliated organization and it was full of symbols and stuff like what you see there.
Other than the login, there's a quite interesting Code of Conduct. Name of company/org is just missing and it describes things like using electronic time cards and equal employment opportunity, which is kind of funny if it actually is freemasonry related (I think they would be one sex only)
This is different though - Facebook wasn’t rebranded to Meta, Facebook is still the official name for Meta’s product. Meanwhile most of Twitter’s logos and other branding have been replaced.
And yet the vast majority of humanity, who do not use Twitter and who, at best, merely know about it in passing, are not in a position to observe this rebrand and would be confused by even calling it "Twitter/X", as though that's some sort of new product under the Twitter brand. Calling it Twitter just reduces confusion.
I'm just disappointed that people go along with takeovers of useful words: x, meta, alphabet. If one was renamed "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" would people still go along with it? What's the limit?
> 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.
Still, it’s probably the most generic letter that you can use alone in a lot of domains.
If you had the opportunity to buy any unique letter domain name of your choice but you may choose only one, most people on this planet would chose X because it can mean anything.
Alphabet is such a cringe name for a company no less. Especially with the meaning google infers. I bet they giggled like little kids in the board room that day. We're so cunning and witty! hehe!
> In a 2018 talk, Schmidt disclosed that the original inspiration for the name came from the location of the then Google Hamburg office's street address: ABC-Straße.
I think we really should adopt the name "X". Because Musk took Twitter and turned it into something else, which is not the old Twitter anymore. So giving it a different name is fitting. That said, I don't necessarily like the name "X".
There was plenty of shit there, but it was the best way to get real-time updates on big news events, as plenty official accounts used it as their primary site.
Is it? Live streaming got more popular and is supported by major platforms; discord and related communities are more accessible; the pandemic taught everyone group chats and video calls; the list goes on.
Interesting. I was not aware that so many TLDs allow single letter domain names. Since so many single letter domain names are for sale, it really seems to be hard to built a brand with a single letter. I personally think that the most important domain names are not the short ones. The most important domain names are the ones with a very big brand. Looking at "google.com" gives me a much stronger signal than looking at "z.com". So the brand really matters.
Incidental: I’ve seen people increasingly using x.com links in their articles. How does that happen? As far as I can tell, it just redirects to twitter.com and that’s where everything is, but it doesn’t seem likely that everyone’s changing twitter to x, so is there something that is giving these links?
I have far less confidence that x.com links will continue to work for years than twitter.com links.
I worked for mDesign for and we owned m.design for a while. We used it for our corporate email addresses (aaron@m.design for example) but the majority of non-tech employees and vendors just couldn’t get used to it and tried things like aaron@m.design.com or etc so it got scrapped.
It bothers me that the author mistyped the z.com link (he links to q.com instead). How ironic given single letter domains are supposed to minimize typos like this...
The “real” value of goods doesn’t change just because the value of currency changes. You’d be much more upset at 30% deflation, which is why there are inflation targets.
huh? did you read the article?
Most are not available, and 2/3 of the .com ones available are being used not squatted.
Almost all the .org ones are being used for relevant branding, not squatted.
Not until you get into .co does there seems to be some squatting.
