[mrweasel]

One letter domains has the same issue as many of the gTLDs, they aren't particularly useful in terms of brand recognition. X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.

Take bob.builders, it's a perfectly valid domain, but if you see it on the back of a van, even if it's www.bob.builders, it's not recognizably as a website. www.b.com has the exact same problem, even x.com / www.x.com is just weird and looks like a mistake. The one letter domains have the added issue that you have no association that might indicate where the domain will take you.

[extheat]

No, I disagree with the idea that one letter domains look wrong. Especially with the many new TLDs, more often than not short URL services use single character domains. Take g.co for example—google uses that in ads everywhere. It’s modern equivalent of calling a short code phone number unrecognizable. But yet most people still instinctively know how to text them for information. However for really esoteric TLDs, I can see why it would be more of a problem, not because the length of the domain, but that the TLD, like .jobs, just doesn’t sound right.

[swozey]

When I see a t.co (x.co now?) link I have literally no idea where it's going to take me at all and I am far, far less likely to click one of them knowing that it's a url shortener. This is such a common thing that there are browser extensions/slack(discord/teams/etc) options to unfurl urls.

[kalaksi]

Exactly. I think it also teaches people to trust all kinds of obscure domains instead of trusting only well known ones. It might be even easier to write the little bit longer domain as you don't have to double check correct spelling. Browser will likely fill it in anyway. I just don't see any real benefit.

[rany_]

Looks like x.co has a minimum asking price of 1 million USD. I wonder who this offer is directed towards ;)

See https://x.co

[swozey]

That's actually surprisingly cheap. I used to be at a 4 letter .com and we paid over $1mil for it in 2015 back when domains were still worth something.

[sublinear]

> X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.

Just "x" alone isn't really the brand.

It's more like "x.com" is the canonical name.

From that perspective, "x" or "x.com" is about as good as brand recognition can get. It's simple and perfectly descriptive of an "everything app" and payment processing business.

[FartyMcFarter]

> It's more like "x.com" is the canonical name.

It sounds like a porn website. I don't think most business owners would want this as their brand, but I guess Elon is special in this way as well.

[da_chicken]

Elon is special in a lot of ways.

Twitter had one of the strongest brands. Not in social media, not in technology, just one of the strongest brands period. Do people realize how rare and difficult that is to do? That little blue bird was everywhere. Elon just gave it up. Flushed it away.

Kind of like those advertising contracts.

[kaba0]

It is indeed his biggest mismanagement, but it’s a serious competition.

At least it broke the image of ‘CEOs must be intelligent’, that was wide spread in certain circles.

[FredPret]

You don't think he's smart?

Maybe he did it for the lol's, or to own his political opponents, or maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into. All of which sound just like him.

Rockets don't fly and electric cars don't drive if they aren't built right, which puts a floor on the IQ of the man who is that involved and hands-on with it. Being early in a major startup is a big deal, never mind a whole string of them.

He may or may not be weird or an asshole but he sure ain't stupid.

EDIT: I've been on the fence about this guy ever since I read his most recent biography, but it's really hilarious how saying something even remotely positive about him brings out an crowd who is enraged at his very being and the notion that such a thing as competence might exist.

[unaindz]

If he did it for the lols of for "owning the libs" he would have told us way back then.

He did it because he thinks the x looks cool, SpaceX, Tesla model X, even his son is called X. He just didn't realized or didn't care that it would kill the amazing brand it had before. That, just after making the mistake of overpaying for twitter while trying to fool around with a buy he didn't even want to make, makes him not very smart.

If that doesn't convince you lots of his proposals for innovative tech are bs. From single line underground tunnels for cars instead of just using more efficient trains, designing a stupid submarine to rescue the kids trapped in the Tham Luang cave as a PR stunt and then calling a pedophile the expert diver who called him out on it. There is probably more. I mean he doesn't even understand the costs of running a page as big as wikipedia so I wouldn't want him near my rockets if I worked for spaceX.

[fluoridation]

>for the lol's

Well, the previous owners of Twitter are laughing with him, all the way to the bank.

>to own his political opponents

I don't see how throwing away a brand does that.

>maybe it was just a mistake he locked himself into

Again, I don't see how that's possible. What he locked himself into was buying Twitter at a stupid price. After he did that he could have simply kept Twitter as it was, which was what he paid for. If he was just going to remake Twitter into something completely different there was no need to buy it at all. He could have just built X from the start. You could argue that what he bought was Twitter's userbase, but that userbase exists because Twitter is the way it is, and there's no guarantee that it'll stick around once Musk finishes turning Twitter into X.

[kaba0]

> Rockets don't fly and electric cars don't drive if they aren't built right, which puts a floor on the IQ of the man who is that involved and hands-on with it

Agree! So what does it have to do with Musk?

Also, I really wouldn’t call someone smart who literally forced himself into buying a company out of ego for much more than its worth. I wouldn’t call someone smart who did that with a car or whatever, let alone that amount of money. Then firing all the people without realizing that won’t fly that easily in Europe. Then all the bullshit he tried to do around the takeover (lines of code, having twitter explained to him, etc) - like I thought he is at least okay at being a web developer given paypal.. but nope, also a fraud there.

He is at the very least just a dumb narcissistic lucky guy who got dealt a good hand of cards, at worst is actively malicious.

[antifa]

> brings out an crowd who is enraged

can't think of a less fanboyish way to describe mild disagreement by 3 random commenters.

[dingnuts]

not that I'm exactly hopeful or that I think this indicates wisdom in Elon's move, or that he will be successful, but it -would- be good to have a social media site that isn't advertising supported, so that the users aren't the product. Aren't we always on about that on this site?

[kaba0]

Well, if someone wants to change the monetizing strategy of their company, it is advisable to figure one out before cutting the existing one.

[sangnoir]

That would be the smart thing to do

[7ewis]

I personally like brand names that _look_ like they could be words, but aren't like Spotify, Twitter, Monzo, Reddit, Google etc.

Believe they need to be short and easy to Google even if you don't know how to spell them (not saying the above brand names are perfect). Find it annoying hearing Xero having to be spelt out on the radio to stop people going to zero.com.

Not particularly a fan of combining two English words together like Facebook, Freetrade, GitHub etc. but the worst is when companies try to own a common word like Apple.

[n3150n]

Twitter is a word in itself, though, both a verb and a noun [0].

[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/twitter

[joshmanders]

Which is where they got their name from. It perfectly describes what Twitter is and was meant to be.

[type0]

> when companies try to own a common word like Apple.

I wish there was a competitor called Banana, powered by minions

[riffruff24]

Did you mean X-COM, the 1994 turn based game? Or XCOM, the 2012 reboot of the same game?

I jest but those Firaxis guys must be eager to do something about this whole thing before twitter blew up. Its around the time for the third installment of the reboot.

[eli]

It's not though. Musk writes it as a single stylized letter and the company name is "X Corp" not "X.com"

[sublinear]

Ah did not know that. This is the only genuine answer in this entire thread!

[sdenton4]

X.com is where you go to save Earth from the alien invasion.

[scotty79]

Not to be confused with https://www.x-kom.pl/ which is where you go to buy parts for your new PC if you live in Poland.

[sumtechguy]

please tell me he is building underground bunkers

[drivers99]

Or "Brand X", the generic "other leading brand" of old commercials, and therefore associated with inferiority in general.

[bad_user]

Except it's missing the "everything" aspect, payments processing, or the support of the Chinese government.

[vasco]

They're working on it (probably minus the china part). Question is if they go bankrupt before then, or if anyone will still use the service by then.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/05/x-is-now-licensed-for-paym...

[andsoitis]

> X.com is pretty stupid as well, you can't meaningfully use it as a brand.

I don't know that it is self-evident.

The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/

[georgyo]

X.org is maybe not in the same bucket as X.com. x.org is very tech oriented and the people who visit that site are much more likely to appreciate the unusual domain.

It doesn't change the fact that it looks a bit weird.

I think any domain that is shorter than it's tld looks a bit funky and requires a second look to process that it is real.

[chimeracoder]

> I don't know that it is self-evident.

> The open source implementation of the X Window System is provided by the x.org foundation. https://x.org/wiki/

I know way more about the inner mechanics of X11 than the average Linux user (which is saying something), but if you had asked me in a different context what x.org pointed to, I would have had no idea. (And then would have said, "oh, right" as soon as you told me the answer).

That's the tell-tale sign of a bad branding decision. I'm not going to fault X too much for that since they literally predate the Web[0], and because they're targeting a very specialized audience, but any mainstream company that makes the same mistake in 2023 deserves whatever criticism they get for it.

[0] The foundation itself doesn't, but the underlying projects do, and the foundation was formed as a merger so it depends on where you choose to start the clock.

[fluoridation]

I mean, "X" is also a bad brand name. X11 is much better.

[eli]

People just google “bob builder” anyway. Domain doesn’t matter so much.

[amadeuspagel]

And then your competitor advertises for "bob builder". And then you start whining about how mean google is, even though you were the one who decided to use google as a domain resolution service, which it was not intended for. There's a reason amazon decided to refer to itself as amazon.com until everyone got it, and that probably saves them billions in google ads per year.

[SargeDebian]

> you were the one who decided

Most people google everything. A significant number of people google "google" in their browser's search/URL-bar to get to Google.com and search for whatever site they could have gone to directly. Builder Bob isn't going to change the average user's behavior in navigating the web.

[eli]

Yeah, that sucks but it is the current state of the world. Trademark registration would help.

You're going to walk around calling your local construction company "bobbuilder.com"? That's a weird vibe for a business that takes place offline. And it doesn't matter because people will still google "bob builder"

> There's a reason amazon decided to refer to itself as amazon.com until everyone got it, and that probably saves them billions in google ads per year.

OK but they still buy all the top ad spots for "amazon" and "amazon.com"

[roenxi]

1. As a consumer I'm far better off searching for people and seeing that ad though, so it'd take a lot of effort to make me type the url in directly.

2. Even if people know they want amazon.com, they're still going to search for amazon.com instead of figure out where the url bar is.

[mikehollinger]

> People just google “bob builder” anyway.

Today they do. When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s, people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering.

It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books, along with the occasional “new phone, who dis?”

[delta_p_delta_x]

> When a domain was $200 to register in the 90’s people treated URLs like phone numbers were also treated at the time - to be written down, memorized and then typed precisely in (with slashes!) to find whatever Bob the builder was offering

This was the case well into the 2000s, if I recall correctly, and even into the mid-late 2010s, when URL shorteners proliferated to manage the complicated URLs generated by Google Forms etc.

[blowski]

> It’s odd to me tbh that phone numbers were solved with contact lists and address books

What's odd about that? I didn't really understand your comment.

[mikehollinger]

I can email [e-mail] but I can't "call" or "text" [e-mail] . You can kinda sorta see this now with imessage / facetime, but that's not consistent and implemented in a standard protocol.

[blowski]

So phone numbers could have become more semantic. Instead we have arbitrary phone numbers and wrap meaning around them.

I guess it’s been so long that I needed to find and type out a phone number that I don’t think about it any more.

[mrweasel]

Okay, but then one letter domains and new gTLDs are worthless. If the domain doesn't really matter why not then get bobbuilder365q.com (or some other TLD that's cheaper).

[idle_zealot]

I guess because if I sw that domain I would assume I was being phished.

[bluedino]

Or linked to an MLM affiliate

idlez.amway.com!

[eli]

".com" looks professional and, more importantly, it very clearly communicates "this is a website address." If it were "bobbuilder.services" it could be a website, but maybe it's an instagram handle or something else.

Otherwise you are correct that it doesn't really matter. The main value of gTLDs is that we ran out of decent available .coms a while ago.

Single letter domains look cool (I guess) and signal that the org has the money to buy a premium domain. Similar to "mortgage.com"

[Joker_vD]

> Okay, but then one letter domains and new gTLDs are worthless

They are, yes, and it's not exactly new news although the better word would be "pointless" (they're not exactly worthless since some people do pay for them).

[herbst]

X.com probably makes sense in the assumption that he turns Twitter into a WeChat clone as kinda 'everything app' which would obviously fail. But as 'everything app' X is kinda a strong brand IMO.

[sgc]

If you abstract from the current porn / nightclub styling of their branding, I agree it has potential.

[orwin]

I'm not sure. It's very tech-nerd (like me) and tech-bro oriented. The logo as well, I'm pretty sure it please the aestetics of tech bros, but at least some nerds/geek find it stupid, and I'm pretty sure it doesn't bring a lot of new female users.

Twitter was already one of the most male-dominated social media (especially outside the US), I think it would be interesting to see the evolution now that this became X. I'd bet a huge majority of new joiners are male (due yo the branding change), and a small majority of 'leaver' are female.

[DonHopkins]

Not as strong as i.com.

[jrockway]

Meanwhile, companies actually named Icom: https://www.icomamerica.com/

It's crazy to me that they didn't buy i.com in the early days.

[mrweasel]

If "X" can transition to a WeChat clone, then maybe, until then it's a shitty brand. The media always needs to present is as: "The social media platform X", "X, formerly Twitter" or "Elon Musks X". The last one seems to indicate the Elon Musk is a bigger brand than "X".

[kaba0]

Everything is a bigger brand than X, it is absolutely insanely stupid.

[FireBeyond]

> but if you see it on the back of a van, even if it's www.bob.builders, it's not recognizably as a website

My email address is [e-mail] - I now automatically say "no .com" or similar. Too many CS experiences where "we can't find your email address" "try [e-mail]" "Oh, there it is".

[andrewfromx]

i think this was true years ago, but now that the general public is internet aware, a billboard with B.com or Z.com would work just fine. In Asia they don't put the .com or .whatever on the ads, they just put the brand name and the general public know to search for that term.

[mrweasel]

Maybe, I find that people are still surprised when they need my email and it's just <firstname>@<lastname>.net and not @hotmail.com / @gmail.com or something like that.

[davchana]

I have had people email me at [e-mail] (I registered it after few missed emails) instead of [e-mail]

[mrweasel]

That is both funny and really sad.