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The service formerly known as Twitter

Aside from YouTube, I'm not a big user of social media.

Up until this morning, I was an occasional user of Twitter.

However, I woke up today to find that I'm now an ex-Twitter user -- or should I say "I'm now a user of a service called X that used to be Twitter".

Are you confused?

Yeah, me too!

What's happened is that Elon Musk has decided to rebrand Twitter as 'X' and, in doing so, he's left a lot of smart people saying "tsk, tsk".

A huge amount of the value that Musk paid billions of dollars for just a short while ago was the name "Twitter".

Overnight, that value is gone... evaporated, disintegrated, eliminated, destroyed.

A number of marketing "experts" simply can't believe that Musk would have, with the stroke of a rebranding pen, effectively wiped billions off the apparent value of this asset -- especially at a time when that branding was a key tool in the fight against Meta's newly launched Threads service.

There are a number (albeit a seemingly much smaller number) of "experts" who claim that getting rid of the Twitter brand is a great move because it allows Musk to reinforce the message that *his* Twitter is all about new features, new functionality and new levels of performance.

I guess only time will tell which of those two groups of experts are actually right. However, I expect that writing off tens of billions of dollars in value, on top of all the value that has already been lost, is at best a brave move and at worst a reckless one.

Just as YouTube seems to be trying to re-invent itself to become just another Netflix, Musk seems hell-bent on reinventing X (nee Twitter) to become something it never was. There are huge risks involved in "change for the sake of change" because moving away from the formula that brought you such success always creates the possibility of failure.

Musk wants to turn X into the Swiss army knife of social media. According to him it will become a funds-transfer and payment platform to rival (and exceed) Paypal, a video publishing system to rival YouTube, a messaging system to exceed that which Twitter offered and, in short, all things to all men.

The problem with this shotgun approach to rolling out features and functions is that you're unlikely to be the best at any specific one of those features. We saw this when Google tried to take on Facebook with its ill-fated Google+ service and when it tried to take on YouTube (before it bought it) with its Google Video offering.

The reality was that Google's pedigree as making the most effective web-search engine simply did not translate into creating other forms of realestate on the web. Musk runs the risk that the same could happen when he tries to reinvent Twitter (as X) and deliver everything any Net user could want, under a single banner.

I'm sitting on the fence on this one but I am leaning towards the end of Twitter's dominance in the market it created. If you're not focused on your core business and instead you start dallying in "add ons" you can lose a lot of ground against lean, hungry competitors who have nothing to lose when they start from ground-zero.

Of course I could say that all those who predicted the demise of Twitter once Musk took ownership and control have already been proven right -- if only by way of the rebranding that's just occurred.

Gosh, we really do live in interesting times.

Carpe Diem folks!

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