Twitter is finally dead. It’s X at the bottom

Like a poisonous moth emerging from its harsh cocoon, the social network formerly known as Twitter has completely morphed into X.com.

Various elements of Twitter had already adopted the rebranding, and the company has been using X.com links since early April. But now the domain has completely flipped, marking the end of a turbulent transition period – and deleting the last remnants of the bird app.

“We are informing you that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings will remain the same,” reads a message at the bottom of X’s login and home pages.

The change has been a long time coming. Musk announced Twitter’s move to X last July. But the billionaire has harbored a dream of creating an “everything app” with that name for decades, and Twitter is his vessel.

“The name Twitter made sense when it was just 140-character messages that went back and forth — like birds chirping — but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video,” Musk wrote on the newly dubbed Twitter last summer X. “In the coming months, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to manage your entire financial world. The name Twitter makes no sense in this context, so we have to say goodbye to the bird.”

Twitter has actually added video and voice calling to its feature set under Musk. It has also given conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones a new platform, created a welcoming environment for porn spam accounts, made verification a dead end, introduced a monetization system that encourages rampant engagement farming, gutted its trust and security team, and created a Rise in hate speech enabled on the platform that NPR described as “US state media,” removed headlines entirely and then re-introduced them in an odd location, brought down a lot of fun bots and third-party apps by using extremely expensive API -Introduced changes while giving Blue Check According to app analytics company SensorTower, app verification led to AI-generated buddy, moved to video, introduced an AI model to help you commit crimes, and recorded in the US saw a decline in usage of more than 20 percent.

The “entire financial world” part is still a work in progress.

A sentimentalist might lament the death of Twitter, which, for all its faults, always had the ability to delight and surprise. But remember that this transformation was inevitable. Musk first owned X.com in 1999, when he co-founded an online bank by that name; It would eventually merge with a competitor and become PayPal. He bought X.com back from PayPal in 2017, tweeting that it had “great sentimental value.” And according to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson, even before the acquisition was finalized, he saw Twitter as a means to create X on Earth.

“In the days leading up to his acquisition of Twitter in late October 2022, Musk’s moods fluctuated widely,” Isaacson wrote Elon Musk. “He said that he would make it the combination financial platform and social network that he had envisioned for X.com 24 years earlier, and he added that he planned to rename it with whatever name he liked.”

To be more precise, Musk’s tweet today announcing that “all core systems are now on X.com” included the logo of the company he founded 25 years ago.

While X may never be the app Musk dreamed it would be, it is undeniably and indelibly a different place than the one he bought. Which, in a way, makes this final transition all the more pleasant. Whatever Elon Musk’s platform has become, it’s certainly not Twitter. Call it whatever you want.