(Jul 25, 2023 02:49 AM)Yazata Wrote: Everyone (all the democrats at least) predicted that Twitter was going to collapse and disappear under Elon's control.
Well, in a way it was true. Twitter really is going away! It's being rebranded as X.com
Everyone is trying to figure out if Tweets are now X's and if Tweeting is now X'ing.
Granted, Twitter hasn't been around as long. But it's still kind of like renaming John Deere to "Hip Elk" or Mountain Dew to "Billy's Piss" or Whirlpool to "Malestrom".
I'm not sure Elon is making a wise decision. I'd like to hear the reasoning behind it.
YazataJul 25, 2023 08:06 PM (This post was last modified: Jul 25, 2023 08:56 PM by Yazata.)
(Jul 25, 2023 06:26 PM)C C Wrote:
(Jul 25, 2023 02:49 AM)Yazata Wrote: Everyone (all the democrats at least) predicted that Twitter was going to collapse and disappear under Elon's control.
Well, in a way it was true. Twitter really is going away! It's being rebranded as X.com
Everyone is trying to figure out if Tweets are now X's and if Tweeting is now X'ing.
Granted, Twitter hasn't been around as long. But it's still kind of like renaming John Deere to "Hip Elk" or Mountain Dew to "Billy's Piss" or Whirlpool to "Malestrom".
I'm not sure Elon is making a wise decision. I'd like to hear the reasoning behind it.
I think that Elon hopes to do with X.com what he hoped to do with one of his original companies, also called X.com. That one merged with another similar startup and was renamed Paypal. He made well upwards of a hundred million dollars from selling his share to Ebay which provided him the money to buy Tesla (which at the time had never produced a car) and to start SpaceX (and start the "new space" revolution).
His original vision for X.com was that it would be an everything-app. It would be an fdic-insured bank, an investment firm selling stocks and mutual funds, a payment processor app (Paypal) and maybe competition for EBay and Amazon. And now with Twitter I think that he sees it as the world's free-speech discussion board and source of crowd-sourced news (moving forcefully into the journalism space). It's already moving into Youtube's space with longer-form videos, livestreams and payments for content creators. He's already made it possible to make longer posts not bound by Twitter's old character-limits. (Elon says you could publish a book if you wanted to.) So it will be moving into the blog and online magazine space too. Video games, photo albums, email, voice mail, messaging...
So I think that what Elon wants to do is expand Twitter into something far more ambitious that will probably end up being almost unrecognizable from what it is now. His goal is to build something like WeChat/Weixin already is in China. (Except without the government control and censorship.)
Probably some parts of that will work better than others. The world-wide free-speech discussion board and crowd-sourced news provider aspect are already getting pushback from anti-democracy types (from CNN to the European Union) who want the inferior little people only exposed to information curated by the better-people (like them, of course). So X.com will be a battle. (I never expect it to succeed in China or Iran.)
But the guy who built America's first successful new automobile company in generations into a behemoth that is now challenging GM, the guy who landed rocket boosters and transformed the economics of spaceflight ('If that was possible, don't you think NASA would have already done it??') --- has never backed away from a challenge. He thrives on them.
(Jul 25, 2023 08:06 PM)Yazata Wrote: [...] I think that Elon hopes to do with X.com what he hoped to do with one of his original companies, also called X.com. That one merged with another similar startup and was renamed Paypal. He made well upwards of a hundred million dollars from selling his share to Ebay which provided him the money to buy Tesla (which at the time had never produced a car) and to start SpaceX (and start the "new space" revolution).
His original vision for X.com was that it would be an everything-app. It would be an fdic-insured bank, an investment firm selling stocks and mutual funds, a payment processor app (Paypal) and maybe competition for EBay and Amazon. And now with Twitter I think that he sees it as the world's free-speech discussion board and source of crowd-sourced news (moving forcefully into the journalism space). It's already moving into Youtube's space with longer-form videos, livestreams and payments for content creators. He's already made it possible to make longer posts not bound by Twitter's old character-limits. (Elon says you could publish a book if you wanted to.) So it will be moving into the blog and online magazine space too. Video games, photo albums, email, voice mail, messaging...
So I think that what Elon wants to do is expand Twitter into something far more ambitious that will probably end up being almost unrecognizable from what it is now. His goal is to build something like WeChat/Weixin already is in China. (Except without the government control and censorship.)
Probably some parts of that will work better than others. The world-wide free-speech discussion board and crowd-sourced news provider aspect are already getting pushback from anti-democracy types (from CNN to the European Union) who want the inferior little people only exposed to information curated by the better-people (like them, of course). So X.com will be a battle. (I never expect it to succeed in China or Iran.)
But the guy who built America's first successful new automobile company in generations into a behemoth that is now challenging GM, the guy who landed rocket boosters and transformed the economics of spaceflight ('If that was possible, don't you think NASA would have already done it??') --- has never backed away from a challenge. He thrives on them.
“There are so many small businesses and so many nonprofits and so many government agencies and things like that all around the world that have relied on Twitter for many years to push their message and reach people,” she said. “And they all have the Twitter icon on everything from their website to their business cards.”
Changing all this costs time and money, she added, not to mention the confusion that comes with a previously unknown brand name.
Elon may re-acquire a new set of subscribers over time to replace them, but he's either going to lose some of these organizations/people or engender a grudge in them if running to a different option likewise carries the same burden. Unless he makes the transition so slow and incremental that the frog doesn't notice the brand name and its surrounding habitat has radically changed until it's two months deep into it.
Maybe the scenario will work out similar to the days when Microsoft released a new version of Windows that required offices to discard old apps and other stuff that it was incompatible with. They grumbled about the costs and issues of having to revise their ways, but they had no choice. (I.e., Linux wasn't going to cut it as a substitute.)
YazataJul 29, 2023 09:21 PM (This post was last modified: Jul 29, 2023 09:48 PM by Yazata.)
Elon's new Bat Signal in San Francisco.
SF is turning into an increasingly accurate copy of the comic book Gotham City (except that in SF the Joker and the Penguin are the mayor and DA). All dark, corrupt and depraved. So SF really does need a super-hero to rescue it from itself.
YazataJul 30, 2023 05:59 PM (This post was last modified: Jul 30, 2023 06:36 PM by Yazata.)
Apparently the city of San Francisco is demanding the removal of X's 'X' sign, claiming that it is illegal since the company didn't receive permits to erect it. In San Francisco everything is tightly controlled by the socialists in charge, except open air drug abuse and fentanyl deaths, the fast-growing homeless population, violent street crazies and all manner of crime from shoplifting to auto-theft and assaults with grave bodily injury. There's no enforcement of any kind on that, and if anyone is arrested, charges are dropped. Meanwhile the office towers are half empty and business after business is abandoning the city. That's "progress", according to the "progressives".
It pains me since I was born in SF, lived there for years and went to college there. But ever since the 1960's, the city has become kind of an amusement park for a certain kind of 20-something from out of state, right out of college, who move there because they want to continue their college lifestyle in a place with an anything goes reputation. For years the city thrived on the constant influx of young educated kids willing to work for peanuts. I have to admit I liked it at one time. The constant flood of newcomers fed countless startups. Many people got rich and the nightlife was epic.
But the reality is that they got what they voted for. Recently, post-COVID, I sense that a tipping point has been reached and things are starting to fall apart as the city enters a "doom loop": Families and businesses leave because of the living conditions, things get worse as tax revenues fall, more normal people leave, things get worse, more normal people leave... It's the same spiral to the bottom that Detroit took. San Francisco is still doing well by some measures, but fear is rising of what the future holds.
Jul 25, 2023 06:26 PM
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