OTHER
Twitter Becomes X: How Elon Musk is Working Towards His 1999 Dream of Creating an ‘Everything App’
Elon Musk, ever since acquiring Twitter for $44 billion (roughly Rs. 3,59,100 crore), has been introducing changes and updates to the microblogging site. The latest upheaval is a complete change of its name and brand logo, from Twitter to X. The billionaire also announced in a tweet that the domain X.com now redirects users to Twitter. From monetising Twitter through premium subscriptions, to paid verification badges, the changes Musk has made at the company speak volumes about how he intends to lead the platform and make it one of his X group of companies.
When Musk first acquired Twitter in October last year, he was clear about his plans for the microblogging site. The Tesla CEO also tweeted at the time that “Buying Twitter is an accelerant to creating X, the everything app.” This “everything app”, as he explained, would be a super all-in-one app like WeChat, which can be used for multiple things including booking rides, sending money, and making payments, apart from facilitating day-to-day communications.
Now, Musk has indeed changed Twitter to X, when it comes to name, domain and even its logo. However, it is not yet a super app yet. On Sunday, July 23, he posted about changing the logo of Twitter to an X. In the following hours, he did not only that, but also made x.com redirect users to Twitter’s home page.
Elon Musk and his love for ‘X’
The rebranding to X is recent, but Musk’s love for this alphabet is not so random. In fact, it has lasted for years now. The idea of X first emerged in 1999, when the billionaire introduced x.com as a finance platform, which later became Paypal after merging with software company Confinity in 2000. According to an article in Time, Musk was removed from his role as the CEO of Paypal in 2000, and it was later sold to eBay in a $1.5 billion deal.
While Musk was reportedly hurt by this, he purchased x.com back from PayPal in July 2017, explaining that “it has great sentimental value”. Later that month, Musk made x.com live again, and it started redirecting visitors to The Boring Company in December 2017.
Since Twitter’s acquisition, Musk has been determined to put his plans for X – his “everything app” – into action. In his conversation with Ron Baron, the new Twitter chief announced his ambition to make Twitter “the most valuable financial institution in the world” in April 2023.
Apart from Twitter, Musk has also used the letter X in his space exploration company’s name, SpaceX; his latest AI initiative named xAI; and the first SUV mode launched by his company Tesla under the name Model X.
Changes to Twitter since Elon Musk’s acquisition
Twitter, under Musk’s leadership, has seen various changes, starting from termination of its then-CEO, Parag Agrawal and other top executives. In the following months, a lot of banned celeb accounts were allowed to return to the platform.
Within a month of his multi-billion dollar purchase, Musk began attempting to monetise Twitter with the reinvention of Twitter Blue. The company also saw a series of job cuts and layoffs across offices, including the sacking of its entire AI Ethics team.
Blue ticks for officially verified accounts as well as subscribers’ accounts started to appear in November. However, the tick marks on paid accounts disappeared within a few days. Musk also introduced different coloured tick marks, based on accounts’ ownership status, in order to recognise news media outlets.
With all these changes, Twitter’s ad revenue has seen a nearly 50 percent drop. Musk has tried to keep users engaged by introducing multiple new features including ive tweeting, community notes, and Twitter Blue for Business. To keep the business on track, Musk recently announced his resignation from the position of CEO, but is still heavily involved, pushing new features such as view counts and the ability to upload long videos.
The next big news came in April 2023, when Musk announced Twitter’s merger with X Corp. In May this year, Musk hired Linda Yaccarino to be the new CEO of Twitter. He has indicated that he will delegate authority to her and will step back to focus on his other companies.
A look at Twitter’s name and the blue bird’s history
Twitter was founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass. Earlier, Twitter was planned to have different names, like Smssy and Twttr, as per CreativeBloq. The first official Twitter logo was just its name written in light blue in sans sherif shapes, and was designed by Linda Gavin.
Twitter’s relationship with a blue bird started soon after its launch. It was created by Simon Oxley, a British graphic designer. According to an NYT article, he offered the design for sale on the iStock website in 2006, and it was bought by Twitter for around $15. The name Larry was a tribute to basketball star and Boston Celtics legend Larry Bird.
The design has changed thrice, in 2009, 2010, and 2012. The current blue bird design was created by Doug Bowman, the company’s former creative director, according to whom “Twitter is the bird, the bird is Twitter.” Ever since, Larry the bird has been known only as the blue Twitter bird.
In 2023, new owner Musk has changed not just the logo, but also the name and the domain of Twitter. The company will now be known as X, with a logo of an X. According to a tweet by Paris Marx, the new logo was created by an in-house designer, using the font monotype. Another Twitter user has also come forward to take credit for the design, revealing the history behind how it all began.
Will the Nothing Phone 2 serve as the successor to the Phone 1, or will the two co-exist? We discuss the company’s recently launched handset and more on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.
YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.
WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.
Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Affiliate links may be automatically generated – see our ethics statement for details.
How To Save Tons of Time With Instagram Auto Reply
Instagram Emoji Guide: Meanings, Reactions, Ideas
YouTube Announces AI-Enabled Editing Products for Video Creators
WhatsApp Passkey Support Reportedly Rolling Out to Beta Testers on Android: How It Works
Career stories: Influencing engineering growth at LinkedIn
Meta Urged Not to Roll Out End-to-end Encryption on Messenger, Instagram by UK
Allowing Users to Promote Stories as Ads (via Marketing API)
![17-tips-for-writing-effective-youtube-descriptions-[free-tool]](https://www.social-ping.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/127190-17-tips-for-writing-effective-youtube-descriptions-free-tool-80x80.png)
17 Tips for Writing Effective YouTube Descriptions [Free Tool]
Facebook Hashtags: Free Hashtag Tool + 70 Ideas
How to Boost Engagement With LinkedIn Carousel Posts and Ads
Enhancing homepage feed relevance by harnessing the power of large corpus sparse ID embeddings
Enhancing Security and Developer Productivity: LinkedIn’s Journey with Implementing Content Security Policy
-
Uncategorized1 week ago3 Ways To Find Your Instagram Reels History
-
OTHER2 weeks agoWhatsApp Chat Interoperability Feature Spotted in Development on Latest Beta Update: Report
-
FACEBOOK1 week agoIntroducing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0
-
OTHER2 weeks agoYouTube ‘Subscribe’ Button Spotted to Be Glowing When Creators Request Subscription
-
Uncategorized1 week agoCommunity Manager: Job Description & Key Responsibilities
-
LINKEDIN1 week agoCareer Stories: Learning and growing through mentorship and community
-
Uncategorized1 week agoThe Complete Guide to Social Media Video Specs in 2023
-
Uncategorized1 week agoSocial Media Intelligence: What It Is & Why You Need It