You can’t do better than the lead a blogger wrote on boingboing.net after the city of San Francisco stopped Twitter, nay ‘X,’ owner Elon Musk from placing a large metal logo on top of the former Twitter headquarters building in San Francisco: “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”
As Musk moves forward with remaking one of social media’s legacy brands, the iconic blue bird was cast from its nest, and, one by one, the letters that spelled “Twitter” were removed from the side of the building’s signage.
While ‘X’ started appearing at the top of the desktop version of Twitter on Monday, the bird was still dominant across the smartphone app. At Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco, workers were seen removing the iconic bird and logo last week until police showed up and stopped them: reportedly, the company had not bothered to pull the required permits, nor, the AP reported, did they tape off the sidewalk to keep pedestrians safe if anything fell.As of last week, the “er” at the end of Twitter remained visible.
The haphazard erasure of the physical and virtual remnants of Twitter’s past was typical of the chaotic way Musk has run the company since his reluctant purchase.
“It’s the end of an era and a clear signal that the Twitter of the past 17 years is gone and not coming back,” Jasmine Enberg, an analyst with Insider Intelligence, told the AP. “But the writing was on the wall: Musk has been vocal about transforming Twitter into platform X from the start, and Twitter was already a shell of its former self.”
Musk asked fans for logo ideas and chose one, which he described as minimalist Art Deco and said “certainly will be refined.” He replaced his own Twitter icon with a white X on a black background and posted a picture of the design projected on Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the [T]witter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk tweeted Sunday. The X.com web domain now redirects users to Twitter.com, Musk said.
