Twitter launched in 2006, and I can remember having arguments with colleagues about whether it was a meaningful new communications medium or just a way for people to share inane details of their daily lives. Clearly, although it’s not the world’s most heavily used social media platform, Twitter has since developed a unique role and become a way for brands to communicate with customers, authors and publishers to reach readers, and journalists to quickly find opinions to quote in articles (often leading to lazy journalism – such as when a Guardian journalist recently quoted a tribute to Sinead O’Connor from Seamus Heaney, who predeceased her by ten years!).
The announcement by wannabe-Bond Villain Elon Musk that he’s rebranding his recent purchase as X raises plenty of questions for brands and personal users who may have been on the platform for a considerable period of time. Even without the rebranding, the drastic reduction in the number of engineers employed by the company has clearly been causing some major headaches. Here are some of the recent developments and the questions they raise:
- Access to Twitter’s API has been severely curtailed for those who can’t afford to pay – which means some integrations have stopped working, or become limited to only updating once every 24 hours. If you need updates in real time (for example, for a social media wall at an event), API access is basically now useless
- For several weeks, Twitter’s embedded timeline widgets have not been working at all, or have been working inconsistently (for example, showing content to users of some browsers but not others, or showing content only to logged in Twitter users). Some of our clients have already asked for these to be removed, or replaced with alternative social media widgets / other content, and if the situation doesn’t improve, no doubt others will follow
- The vast majority of the websites we create will have at least a link to the owner’s Twitter feed, usually in the form of an icon in the header header or footer. Will site owners be happy to leave the instantly recognisable Twitter bird in place, or will they want to switch over to an X icon? Should we all just start referring to X as “the social network formerly known as Twitter”, evoking the period when Prince changed his name to an unpronounceable squiggle?
- The Twitter bird has been around so long that it’s iconography is built in to many WordPress themes, plugins (such as social sharing tools) and fonts (such as the extremely useful FontAwesome). Even if the way Twitter works doesn’t change, it will take a long time for these things to update to reflect the new brand (and anyone using an older theme or plugin that’s no longer being updated may be out of luck)
- If the rebrand sticks, do we still call posts on X ‘Tweets’ or something else?
- Musk does own the domain x.com, which already redirects to Twitter. Will x.com change to become the primary domain for the system? Will there be any technical implications if the change does happen? It seems entirely possible that at least some integrations will break, given how long Twitter has been around
- At what point will Meta’s “Twitter killer” app Threads mature to the point where it becomes a viable replacement for Twitter / X? At the moment, Threads is app-only, so can’t be used to link to profiles or share content via a web browser? This would be the minimum that would be needed for website owners to consider embedding it into their websites, we would say
For some more background to this whole sorry saga, check out this great article on Mashable.com. If your website is affected by any of these issues, do contact us.