Billionaire entrepreneur and tech giant Elon Musk is rebranding Twitter as "X" – a step aligned with his long-term vision of creating a revolutionary social media platform that goes beyond the traditional concept of a social network.
The vision entails creating an "everything app," integrating messaging, e-commerce and peer-to-peer payments. His ambition is to develop a "super-app" that integrates different services and features, much like Tencent's WeChat in China. WeChat has messaging, video calls, games, photo sharing, ride-hailing, food delivery, banking and shopping, all within a single app.
Musk has expressed his admiration for WeChat and its success in China, stating that if a similar app could be achieved outside China, it would be a massive success. (Related: Meta launches Twitter rip-off “Threads” application, immediately starts censoring users for voicing unapproved thoughts.)
"If you're in China, you kind of live on WeChat," he said. "It does everything — sort of like Twitter, plus PayPal, plus a whole bunch of things, and all rolled into one, with a great interface. It's really an excellent app, and we don't have anything like that outside of China."
His goal is to transform Twitter into a platform that offers an all-encompassing experience, combining social interactions with diverse functionalities that cater to the everyday needs of its users.
"Soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds," Musk tweeted on his official Twitter account on July 23. Alongside the announcement, the company projected its new "X" logo on the exterior of its headquarters. In line with the rebranding, Musk revealed that posts on the platform would no longer be referred to as "tweets" but as "x's."
Experts don't think Western market will embrace "everything app"
While Musk's acquisition of Twitter was initially seen as part of his vision for a free speech forum, he has dropped hints that his ultimate goal with the purchase was to develop a comprehensive app similar to the WeChat of China. But experts are skeptical of Musk's aspirations to create a similar platform for the Western market.
Analysts point out that while WeChat's success in Asia is well-established, the Western market has yet to embrace such comprehensive platforms. Creating a platform like "X" will require convincing users to adopt a new way of accessing different services they are conditioned to use separately.
Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at Insider Intelligence, pointed out that incorporating payment services into a social network like Twitter poses significant security and privacy concerns. Convincing users to trust Twitter with more personal and financial information may prove challenging.
Julian Birkinshaw, the academic director of the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital at the London Business School, argued that the success of WeChat was rooted in China's current situation. The established payment systems in Western countries like Europe and Canada may hinder the adoption of a super app that attempts to consolidate multiple services.
"If someone tried to do that in Europe or Canada, a lot of people will say, 'Well, I don't need that. I've already got my Apple Pay, I've already got my PayPal ... [or] I just use my debit card.'"
"There is no problem to be solved. And so to try to kind of fold in some new functionality when in fact people are very comfortable with their ingrained habits about how they live their lives – there's no reason to do that," said Birkinshaw.
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Watch this video of Clay Clark dropping the truth bomb about the sinister agenda of Elon Musk on his Twitter 2.0, now known as X.
This video is from The Jeff Dornik Show channel on Brighteon.com.
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