Twitter was never the largest social network, but it remained one of the most influential as a home to celebrities, journalists, and influencers of all sorts and the go-to network for breaking news. Since Elon Musk purchased it, Twitter’s employee count has dropped by more than half, advertisers have tightened budgets, and it’s charging money for access to verified checkmarks and Tweetdeck. Oh, and now it’s called X instead of Twitter.
The company announced “early access to the X Hiring Beta” that’s available to Verified Organizations (aka gold checks that pay X / Twitter at least $1,000 per month for the privilege). Organizations that use it can feature job listings on their X profiles — you can see how it works on Vercel’s profile.
It’s not quite a LinkedIn killer, but it’s a step in the direction of Elon Musk’s vision of making X an “everything app.”
The post seems to be part of Musk’s latest campaign to encourage writers and journalists to post more on the platform. News organizations may not be as interested if X actually goes through with removing headlines from links to news articles, though.
Matt Binder of Mashable offers an analysis of data collected on basic account information from all the X accounts that follow Musk. Here are some stats from the article:
• About 42 percent (65.3 million) have no followers.
• About 41 percent (62.5 million) have no tweets (either because they have never tweeted, or have deleted their tweets).
• Over 25 percent (38.9 million) created their accounts on or after the date of Musk’s Twitter acquisition.
• The median number of followers of all of the accounts is one.
In the approximately ten months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, there’s hardly been a week when the social network (or its owner) wasn’t in upheaval. So while some people are staying put, others are moving on. If you’re one of the latter, it’s probably a good idea to delete all your previous tweets first. Here’s how.
The rebranding of Tweetdeck has finally been announced. Tweetdeck users began noticing a paywall and the new name of the popular Twitter app on Tuesday, but there was no official communication from X, the company formerly known as Twitter, until today.
If you really want to extra verify yourself, I guess that’s coming. Let’s hope it’s not a system that’s only available to X Premium subscribers, but since you already have to pay to be verified, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the case.
Those are words a US District Court Judge said to Twitter’s attorney, Ari Holtzblatt, during a February hearing about Donald Trump’s Twitter data. Holtzblatt had no idea:
MR. HOLTZBLATT: It is similar to tweets, and I don’t know more than that, Your Honor.
THE COURT: You don’t use “fleets.”
MR. HOLTZBLATT: I had not heard of fleets until this morning.
THE COURT: And was fleet used on this account?
MR. HOLTZBLATT: It is a vanishing tweet.
THE COURT: A vanishing tweet.
MR. HOLTZBLATT: I guess fleet — that makes sense, fleeting.
Yes, Mr. Holtzblatt. It sure does.
Friend of The Verge Cameron Faulkner showed me today that retweets are now called “reposts,” and as my colleague Alex Cranz wrote about recently, the old tweet button now says “post.”
I might be a bit late in noticing the changes, but I’m sad to see that the term “tweets” is pretty much gone from X. At least the official term wasn’t actually “x’s.”
The platform formerly known as Twitter is discontinuing its “Follower Objective” ads, Axios reports, which are the ones that include a prominent “Follow” button in the promoted post. The implication is that X wants to nudge advertisers towards more multimedia rich ad styles, even if that means giving up a format estimated to be worth over $100 million to the company annually.
When I copy post URLs from the share sheet in the X iOS app, they’re on my clipboard as x.com links, not twitter.com. On the web, x.com links still redirect to twitter.com, but I’m guessing things will fully flip over to X soon.
-Yaccarino said she has “autonomy” under Elon. “[He] focuses on new technology ... and I’m responsible for the rest.”
-She demurred on the Musk v Zuckerberg fight. “We’ll see if that cage match really does happen.”
-But she said Elon really is training for it. “I’ve had a front row seat of witnessing that.”
-As for Threads, she thinks Meta’s rival is skating to where the puck already is. “They may be building to what Twitter was ... and we’re focused on what X will be.”
ABC’s managing director David Anderson says the broadcaster will reduce its usage of X (formerly known as Twitter) to just four official accounts to allow its staff to focus on what provides “the most value.” He also cited an increase in “toxic interactions” on the platform.
In response, X owner Elon Musk accused the broadcaster of preferring “censorship-friendly social media.”
You can read more about the new feature in this blog post. I wonder who will pick “relaxed?”
You’ll also be able to sort by “most recent” and “most engaged with,” according to a screenshot from X designer Andrea Conway.
The Twitter owner — who we can only assume is entirely, 100 percent, without a doubt, entirely serious about a cage match with Mark Zuckerberg — made several statements about the proposed cage match on Sunday.
Ignore whether or not SpaceX has a permit for discharging wastewater from its most recent rocket test; instead, stay tuned to find out if the billionaire who is “lifting weights throughout the day” will have a doctor’s note for opting out of the proposed August 26th date.
The program that can’t make its payments on time has a new name, as highlighted in Elon Musk’s tweet from last night. Also, the official handle for the account has changed to @Premium.
Unlike several other handles X has hijacked from users in its rebranding push, like @Sports and @Music, it’s unclear if anyone was using this one until now. The most recent use shown in the Internet Archive is a spammy “premium brands news” account in 2015.
The owner of the @music handle on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, says that X unceremoniously took over the username Thursday. The old @music account has been moved to @musicfan.
X also took the @X handle from its former owner last week.
Twitter, or X as it’s currently being rebranded, now has live broadcasts again. Elon Musk posted on X to confirm that “live video now works reasonably well,” months after the “8-Bit Elon” test stream in May. It marks a return of the Twitter live broadcast feature after it disappeared following the shutdown of Periscope in 2021.
Nine months after taking over the company that was once known as Twitter, Elon Musk has sued and been sued a lot. Add AFP to the long list of plaintiffs. The French press agency has filed a copyright lawsuit accusing X of ignoring its obligations stemming from the national copyright law.
France requires platforms such as X to enter discussions with publishers seeking remuneration for distributing news. Google previously refused to comply but was forced to pay €500 million in 2021 by the French competition authority. Musk has called it “bizarre” to “pay *them* for traffic to their site where they make advertising revenue and we don’t”.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee keep saying they’re investigating “collusion” between the Biden administration and Big Tech to “censor” conservatives, but they’re starting to act more like an Elon Musk fan club than anything else.
On top of investigating the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into Musk’s Twitter takeover, they’re now going after the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for its role in this “censorship regime.”
Musk, of course, sued CCDH just two days ago, accusing the non-profit of unlawfully accessing Twitter data and cherry-picking posts to make the platform look more hateful than it is.
I’m going to assume the answer is no, but Semafor reports that the company is “seeking a financial-data giant to build a trading hub inside the app.” Should this come to fruition, it could be just one of many pieces of Elon Musk’s vision to make X an “everything app.”
...that is, if the company is working on some kind of stock trading platform at all. “No work is being done on this to the best of my knowledge,” according to Musk.
[www.semafor.com]
