Bye Bye Bird

Twitter users woke up this past Saturday morning to find that the iconic blue and white bird logo had been transformed into an X. Twitter’s rebranding should not come as a surprise. Back in April, Musk legally changed the name to X Corp. Why do this? Why erase the carefully curated image of a platform that has existed for over a decade? Well, because Musk is not looking to keep Twitter the same, but instead mold the foundations of the app to his vision. Acquiring Twitter for $44 billion allowed Musk to avoid building a global app from scratch and gave him a starting point to launch his idea of an “everything” app. 

The “Everything” App

Wait, how can an app be “everything”? What does that even mean? The concept of an “everything” app is the idea that anything a user could possibly want to do online is available in one place. Musk developed his vision for X based on an app in China called WeChat. Known as an “everything” app,  WeChat has features for dating, chats, rideshare, social media, payments, and more. 

WeChat was created back in 2011 by the corporation Tencent. The app is used by 1.4 billion people; almost all of China’s population! It is not just an app but a super-app with even more functions available than those listed. Anything and everything to do online is possible through WeChat.

The super-app still has a plethora of drawbacks. For starters, it takes up a huge amount of phone storage. Secondly, with the app’s wide scope of capabilities, it faces privacy and censorship issues. Also, China lacks competition regulation, meaning WeChat can easily squash any potential challengers. Given these significant differences, it begs the question of whether an app like WeChat will be successful in Western society.

The transformation of Twitter to X is an enormous undertaking and the bottom line is Musk does not have the manpower to get it done. Twitter is currently run by a skeleton crew after the past tumultuous months in which we saw the departure of 80% of the personnel. In order to achieve his vision, Musk is going to need investment along with staff and infrastructure. Twitter has already lost their stream of advertisers because of the unpredictability of the company.

Whatever updates and changes are made, trust SparkShoppe to keep you informed on all the marketing news with our blog!