I still tweet. I don’t love it anymore, but I still do it partly because it’s still an important part of social promotion for my content, and also because, like a smoker who can’t quite kick the habit, I can’t stop.
Word that a renegade group of businesspeople and lawyers wants to take back the Twitter brand name, its bluebird logo, and even the ‘tweet’ gave me a moment of elation – or is it hope? – for a revival of a bygone era. The truth is, though, it’s probably way too late for that.
It’s a bold move and, clearly, an effort to revive a bygone era. As Coates told Arstechnica, “I remember some time ago, I’ve had celebrities react to my content on Twitter during the Super Bowl or events, and we want that experience to come back, that whole town square, where we are all meshed in there.”
A steep hill and a tired bird
There are potential hurdles, like X’s still, until very recently, use of the Twitter domain as a backend for connecting to third-party sites (and possibly services), and the fact that X has never come up with anything other than a ‘tweet’ to describe what people do on the platform. Also, if you see a tweet posted outside X, it often has this label on it: ‘X (formerly Twitter)’.
Despite Elon Musk’s apparent hatred for the brand name and that blue bird, which he ripped off the company’s downtown San Francisco headquarters as soon as he could, I suspect Musk will fight this effort with everything he has. I’m not saying it’s because Musk would ever consider going back to ‘Twitter’, it’s just that he’s spiteful enough to not want anyone else to have or use the brand.
Also, I would not put it past Musk to launch a separate ‘Twitter’ platform for people who don’t love X. That might sound crazy, but Musk has expressed interest in, for instance, the revival of other previously discontinued Twitter brands like Vine. There’s literally no reason for the six-second video platform to exist anymore, not when TikTok exists. Naturally, this was a head fake from Musk, who later declared he was bringing Vine back in AI form.
Still, Musk likes to dangle these possibilities in front of long-time Twitter users to keep them interested, and hopeful for something better.
It’s dead, Jim
What will not happen, though, is a revival of ‘Twitter’ and old-school ‘tweeting’ on any platform, old or new.
It’s not that I don’t think Operation Bluebird could succeed. The law might actually be on its side. According to Peroff and Coates Musk has “abandoned” the brand and trademark. But that bird, and those words, no longer mean the same thing as they once did. They no longer spark joy.
Even before Musk bought the platform in 2022, but especially after, a darkness crept into the service. Factions rose up, as did borders in that virtual town square. We took sides, grew angry. Engaging on Twitter and then X could feel like stepping into a boxing ring, but without protective headgear.
Anger and hate not only flooded in, but the man who kept the floodgates open was Musk himself, who seemed to think that insults and invectives were proof of a free-speech platform.
The BlueBird logo, which, until recently, could still be found in various parts of X, grew tarnished and then finally toppled from its perch, dead.
Peroff and Coates might wrest the Twitter name from Musk, but they’ll face the twin challenges of rehabilitating a damaged brand and trying to launch yet another microblogging social media platform when we already have X, Threads, and Bluesky. The last is the nearest thing we have to old-school tweeting (it’s no accident that it’s a blue logo), but even it has failed to revive the old Twitter and tweeting magic.
That doesn’t surprise me. Magic is not persistent; if it were, it wouldn’t be called ‘magic,’ just ‘life’. Something as special as the OG Twitter simply can’t endure indefinitely.
Twitter had its moment in the sun, its life as a positive and open town square. But like most bustling cities, it eventually succumbed to population density and corruption.
So, good luck with Operation Bluebird, guys. If you succeed, I will visit; but no one, least of all me, expects it to be Twitter 2.0.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
