In a major rebrand teased over the weekend, Elon Musk changed the Twitter logo to an “X” on Monday, taking the platform yet another step closer to his dream of creating an “everything app.”
On the platform’s web version, the change appeared Monday morning.
The new logo, a white stylized “X” on a black background, also replaces the bird as a badge indicating an employee account.
The official Twitter account, @Twitter, has also been rebranded and is now called “X,” with only the new logo as a profile picture and a bio reading “What’s happening?”.
As a result of Elon Musk’s announcement over the weekend, Twitter has removed its iconic bird logo in favor of an X. The change is already live on the website.
It is also noteworthy that Musk tweeted that x.com is now redirecting to twitter.com. He also referred to this logo as “interim,” so we might see another logo change in the future.
Musk limits the number of Tweets users can read per day on Twitter
In a tweet earlier this month, Musk announced “temporary limits” on tweets users could view “to address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation.”
According to Musk, verified accounts could read 6000 posts per day, while unverified accounts could read 600 posts per day. Musk tweeted a few hours later, “Rate limits are increasing soon to 8000 for verified, 800 for unverified, and 400 for new unverified.”
Musk increased the restrictions to 10,000 for confirmed users, 1,000 for unverified users, and 500 for brand-new unverified users less than an hour later.
Subscribers to Twitter logo Blue can now download videos posted to X
Twitter Blue members can now download videos shared on X by other subscribers, according to an X Help Center article titled “How to share and watch videos on Twitter.”
According to the modification, unless the poster specifically opts out, all new films will be available for download. There’s also an age limit – if your account says you’re under 18, then downloads will not be enabled.
At this year’s Code Conference, X/Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino will discuss Twitter’s transformation into X, working with Elon Musk, and courting advertisers.
You cannot see or download the video if your Twitter Blue-subscribing account is set to private, so only subscribers you’ve allowed to follow can see it. There is no persistent setting on the page that allows you to opt out of having your videos downloadable on a per-tweet basis.
The video downloads are not limited beyond those cases. X now allows Twitter Blue subscribers to upload videos up to two hours long — which has already proven problematic for the company, as when users were able to watch the entire Super Mario Bros. movie — it seems as though the site is setting itself up for legal trouble unless it can spin up its moderation capabilities to properly handle copyrighted materials.
By implementing other changes, such as ad revenue sharing, Musk has been trying to make his platform more appealing to creators. With video downloads, X is now more on par with other short-form social networks, such as TikTok and Instagram, which both allow users to download videos.
Musk requested logo suggestions from his 149 million Twitter followers and appears to have settled on the one he flagged on Sunday via a stuttering video.
Musk has long been obsessed with the “X” and has promised to launch an “everything app” at some point, likely using Twitter as its vehicle. Musk described Twitter shortly before buying it as “an accelerator to creating X, the everything app” before buying it in October.
Last year, Musk acquired Twitter and folded it into X Corp, whose parent company is X Holdings Corp. This month, Musk announced he was launching a new artificial intelligence company called xAI.
The crowdsourced logo was posted by Twitter user Sawyer Merritt, the co-founder of a sustainable clothing business, who tweeted that the font had been used for a discontinued podcast. Unicode, a standard for encoding text characters so they can be displayed online, has been used in the logo.
Because Twitter’s logo is based on a Unicode font called Blackboard Bold, it is unclear whether it can be copyrighted or protected as a trademark.
Professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University Alan Woodward said: “Companies frequently spend a lot of money developing a distinctive brand to stand out from the competition. Using a standard character that anyone can use seems strange.”
X is modeled after WeChat, a Chinese platform that offers users a variety of services, including messaging, ordering a taxi, and paying bills. Earlier this year, Musk told Twitter staff: “You basically live on WeChat in China. If we can recreate that with Twitter, we will have great success.”
In a tweet on Sunday, Yaccarino said that X would be AI-powered and would center around audio, video, messaging, payments, and banking. On Monday morning, Twitter’s desktop application displayed the new logo in place of its signature bird symbol, and the official Twitter account was now under X.
At Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, the X logo has already been projected throughout the building, and conference rooms have been renamed to include X.
As a result of advertisers withholding spending on Twitter and the emergence of a “Twitter killer” rival called Threads, launched by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, analysts cautioned that the rebranding move could be high-risk.
As a result of changing Twitter’s app name, Elon Musk will have wiped out 15 years of a brand name that has become a part of our cultural lexicon,” said Mike Proulx, research director at the Forrester analysis firm.
Musk is essentially starting over with ‘X‘ while its competition is already in place.” This is a very risky move.