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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?”
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).
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)
Readit News
It's still Twitter. There's no need to call it X unless you want to want to do free advertising for Musk's name change.
Changing the name to X was just a bad idea.
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.
Until then calling it "twitter dot com" is still accurate.
Wasnt expecting that :(
Looks like nissan.com site is dead too, this is how it looked in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200608045052/https://nissan.co...
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I want b.com because "Be dotcom!" sounded cool.
All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable
Someone else made a comparison to phone numbers which turned out to be accurate. Simple sells.
Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.
I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.
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.
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.
It sounds like a porn website. I don't think most business owners would want this as their brand, but I guess Elon is special in this way as well.
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.
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.
I don't know that it is self-evident.
The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/
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.
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?”
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.
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".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_lodge
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