Now that he's changed the name and the founders have moved on....

not only that, heaps of cultures associate birds with rumours and news (a little bird told me that ...). I was genius marketing and top tier branding

and also it had the bonus that being commonly used in language still posed no risk of genericizing the trademark.

people say kleenex to mean tissue, xerox to mean photocopy (xerox famously put out ads telling people not to use their trademark name in generic context)...

... but never twitter to mean any social network or even microblogging. or tweet to mean a post on facebook or even mastodon. tweet is almost always used to mean a post on twitter specifically.

so it was not only universally recognized and thoroughly integrated in language, but also specific enough to be safe for the trademark. an absolute dream for any brand.

and what did the genius do? throw it away for a single letter that's used to mean unknown or generic (great brand strategy btw), but only when it's not used to mean porn.

seriously, since I'm a graphic designer and interested in these things i've seen some bad rebrandings before but this has to be the absolute worst.

I hate the muskrat as much as most people, but killing twitter was pretty cool.

Or bluesky.

As I understand it, Mastodon doesn't federate like Lemmy/K-Mbin does (and Sublinks & Piefed too!), where in order to follow someone you need to be on the same instance? Or something? Anyway Mastodon needs some work before it could be a viable replacement.

Edit: I did not phrase this well at all. Oh well, it led to an interesting discussion so I'll leave it here for posterity, but it's incorrect. I think the only correct part of the above is that if you try to leave a Mastodon instance, then like a Lemmy one, you can't really take your account with you (only your settings, but people who followed you before will have to now follow you again in the new location, it does not automatically transfer). So it "federates" but it's not "freely transferable" as people were over-selling it to be.

If he's actually serious he should also sell the domain so someone could host a mastodon instance on it

It would still have to be some sort of social media site but I think so, yeah. The point of trademarks is to make sure you don't confuse consumers. In theory you could make a restaurant called Twitter and be fine.

trademarks have to be protected and used. Its likely you could reasonably win a trademark battle with him since he's rebranded

That's Bluesky. It's supposed to be a federated social media, but right now there's only one kind of software for it and you can't yet self-host it (although you can self-host your data). The open-source protocol, known as AT, was created by Twitter back in the day, and Jack Dorsey and a bunch of staff were able to rescue it when Musk took over.

AT does not federate with ActivityPub, but users of either protocol can appear on the other using Bridgy; and some Friendica instances have basic support for AT. The equivalent of "fediverse" is "ATmosphere" (with the first two letters capitalised).

Since it became public (as opposed to invite-only), Dorsey left the platform and went back to Nostr (yet another microblogging platform, this time built around blockchain :-P).

It's actually quite a nice place, in my opinion, with a vibe similar to a combination of Twitter and Tumblr.

Sorry for going into this much detail. I just really like explaining things.

EDIT: Turns out, the word being thrown around in place of "tweet" was also slang for cum. I have removed it, as this was probably originally a joke.

It’s Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter 2.0 platform. The problem is, it makes all of the same mistakes Twitter did. So, it’s just earlier in it it’s absolute-shit-show lifecycle — not actually different.

Steamed Hams but it's Mega Man Battle Network

Go away, there's no Armin Tamzarian and there never was!

Since flutter is a comparatively popular mobile framework it probably wasn't a good way to make a name for yourself.

*(I personally hate it and think it's going to die without Google backing it but at the time of writing it's pretty commonly discussed as an option for cross platform mobile dev)

That would be cool, but Bluesky was still using a photo of literal blue sky as its icon until recently.

That's funny because I use it and I have yet to see a brand on there. It's just mostly pleasant people talking.

Yeah, we kinda make the internet go

Best deal with it 😎🐺

They keep the internet running, they can stay.

Why is that a problem?

I've never used Xhitter