Such a business genius to just completely trash well known name branding that most companies would kill to have. Twitter was a household name, the bird instantly recognizable with the brand, and “tweet” and “retweet” as common words.
Such a brilliant display of Vision™ by Musk.
and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.
people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)…
… but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.
so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.
and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that’s used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it’s not used to mean porn.
seriously, since I’m a graphic designer and interested in these things i’ve seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.
not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that …). I was genius marketing and top tier branding
And here we are, more than a year later, and any time anyone actually calls it by its new name, it’s always followed by (previously Twitter). Hilarious. Because the new name is fucking nonsense
Or use Mastodon. Either way…
