If you’ve secretly been hoping X owner Elon Musk would change his mind and resurrect the Twitter brand, you won’t like this.
If you’ve visited X recently, you likely saw a message across the bottom of the screen. The message indicated that the website is in the process of transferring everything to the X.com domain. That means that, once the changeover is complete, the last of the Twitter brand will be obvious on the platform.
As I type this, if I go to Twitter.com, it takes me to my home page at Twitter.com. If I go to X.com, it takes me to the same home page with an X.com address. My profile, @patricksplace, displays just fine at the Twitter.com version or at the X.com version.
Sooner or later, it appears the plan is that no matter what you type going forward, you’ll end up at X.com. The Twitter brand will finally be gone.
Musk announced last July that he intended to toss the Twitter brand in favor of X. Many of us, myself included, assumed he had to be joking. After all, Twitter had become one of the best-known social media networks. Even people who’d never joined it — and never wanted to — still knew what it was.
Everyone knew what it meant to “tweet” something. News articles referred to “tweets” on the platform without having to explain what a tweet was. But he seems to be obsessed with that particular letter. In fact, he previously used X.com as the prior home of what we now know as PayPal.
But now it looks like it could be the permanent home for what used to be Twitter.
A few days ago, The Verge reported that typing “Twitter.com” would automatically send you to Musk’s preferred domain. But it noted it was seeing a few instances where that didn’t happen. Days later, I’m still seeing those instances. Both domains still work…for now.
Musk himself tweeted — make that posted — on X that all of the platform’s core systems are now on that domain:
Oddly enough, as proud as he seems to be of the new logo for X, he used a completely different one to announce that his platform had migrated there.
I’m still on X, obviously. I’ve been there for 15 years now. But I can’t say Musk has improved on what he purchased…no matter what domain his product operates on.
