Say farewell to Twitter and welcome to X Corp. It’s been a year since Elon Musk first talked about taking over the microblogging social media site Twitter, and it’s been about six months since the deal was finished. Since Musk, a billionaire businessman known for his innovative companies like Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, first walked into Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters holding a sink two quarters ago, a lot has changed for “the internet’s town square.”
Analysts and pundits have yet to find new and ongoing signs that Twitter is coming apart under its new management. For example, it introduced Twitter Blue verification and cut 75% of its staff.
The X App Holy Grail
Musk had talked about turning Twitter into an “X App” months before. These platforms, of which China’s WeChat is the most famous, give users access to everything on the internet in one place.
WeChat is a text, phone, and video calling app for people in the PRC? It works like WhatsApp or Telegram. It’s also a social network where users can post and share pictures, videos, and comments to a global feed. It’s also a place to get long-form content, as many articles and longer videos are shared, accessed, and watched there. Is WeChat also the most popular way to make, send, and receive payments? In the US, Venmo and CashApp are usually used for these tasks.
Having a real X App in the English-speaking world would be very helpful, but many people wonder if this will ever be possible. After all, most X Apps have been made where internet facilities and smartphone use have been slower to spread. Because of this, it is becoming more and more normal in some Southeast Asian countries to ship phones with Facebook and all of its features already installed.
Meta’s Fumble
Facebook is an important piece of this puzzle, as Zuckerberg’s Meta corporation—the umbrella for Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp—which can attest to over 2 billion registered users, is widely thought to have attempted to become an X App. Though this pitch faltered before the constant competition, fragmentation, and lost revenue from advertising.
Crypto Twitter?
The news that Musk had changed Twitter’s company name to “X-Corp” on April 4 has made many wonder if this is just the latest in many mistakes. Musk, who started PayPal, may have a smaller, more realistic vision for the X App. There have been rumors of new agreements with companies that work with cryptocurrencies. This makes it likely that Twitter could soon add crypto finance tools. Even though this news won’t affect investors who prefer to trade online through trusted and top exchanges, one “cannot underestimate the optics” of these new events. Even though Twitter is the smallest of the “big three” social media sites, it has always had disproportionate power because it is seen as the center of online public debate.
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