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.

See https://x.co

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Have you considered that x.com might have been an impulse buy (at the market rate, I might add). He could set $40b on fire and still be one of the richest people in history.

I also don't get the hate around that site - it's still very much up and running.

Maybe this site hates him because he trimmed a ton of fat in Twitter's engineering department. Maybe people on the left hate him because he's living proof that some people are just competent. People on the right used to hate him because he's anti-oil. Maybe the tallest trees just catch the most wind.

Just as a fact: his only technical contribution to teslas is the design of the goddamn rearview mirror. There are plenty of (unconfirmed) accounts of having to deliberately present information to elon a certain way so he will accept the decision made by the experts, which while I don’t know how true, seems surprisingly plausible, given his personality.

Also, being the richest person doesn’t mean that $40b in immediate hard cash is not a big hit. Most of this evaluation is very transient, e.g. the evaluation of tesla shares (which are very overvalued right now — is it really worth more than all the top 3 car companies together? When they sell orderS of magnitude more cars?)

There are plenty of “fans” of him here, as this libertarian view is quite popular among the startup community. With all due respect, this “on the left” comment is just braindead.

> Just as a fact: his only technical contribution to teslas is the design of the goddamn rearview mirror. There are plenty of (unconfirmed) accounts of having to deliberately present information to elon a certain way so he will accept the decision made by the experts, which while I don’t know how true, seems surprisingly plausible, given his personality.

First of all, how do you know this. Where you a fly on the wall for the entire life of Tesla Inc? This is supremely implausible.

Second, why are you willing to believe that good decisions can be made by "the experts", but if it's a rich, brash person you don't like, they can't possibly be "an expert"?

> Also, being the richest person doesn’t mean that $40b in immediate hard cash is not a big hit. Most of this evaluation is very transient, e.g. the evaluation of tesla shares

He didn't even buy the whole thing himself; he has partners in it with him.

> (which are very overvalued right now — is it really worth more than all the top 3 car companies together? When they sell orderS of magnitude more cars?)

Tesla might be overvalued, but selling "orders of magnitude more cars" is actually a drawback if you can't do so profitably.

GM: revenue 165b, profit 10.5b (https://valustox.com/GM)

Tesla: revenue 92b, profit 10.2b (https://valustox.com/TSLA)

Ford: revenue 165b, profit 4.3b (https://valustox.com/F)

They may well be worth more than the others given that they're positioned for much better future growth.

I'll just let your last comment stand on it's own merit.

This is his only patent.

> Second, why are you willing to believe that good decisions can be made by "the experts", but if it's a rich, brash person you don't like, they can't possibly be "an expert"?

This is not an american movie where the boss can change the tide of the whole company by just being so damn good. Reality is also not about CEOs bullshitting why are they so productive with their yoga-10min sleep-whatever diet, working 40 hours in 24. Both tesla and spacex require actual hard engineering knowledge and experience, which elon thoroughly lacks. Like, even if he would be super-human intelligent, these are (and most fields are like this) so specialized, that he couldn’t contribute in a useful manner. Let alone with his actual capabilities, which are thoroughly lacking.

- Have you interviewed Elon? You have great insight into his "actual" capabilities, as well as his "actual engineering knowledge and experience", not to mention his sleep schedule.

- Do you think there's no value in technical leadership?

- Why do you think progress can be made by many correct decisions at the detailed level made by many engineers, but not by a few correct decisions at the high level made by an engineering leader?

- Do you honestly, honestly believe the only thing he contributed to was the rear-view mirror because that's his only patent?

(by the way, that's exactly the kind of joke that he would love)

- Has it occurred to you that he did not file a patent application for every single thing he did?

- Or that he certainly had a directing influence in almost every aspect of those cars?

- Or that his main contribution is creating the business and factory system that makes the cars?

There's a lot to criticize about this man, and all other people who do things on a big scale, but it really looks like 99.9% of the criticism is just mindless, directionless hate.

There is. But people wash it together with technical expertise, which is very different. And I’m not convinced of any of these in case of elon. Just look at bullshit like the hyperloop - a kid can realize have utterly bullshit that “idea” is.

> Has it occurred to you that he did not file a patent application for every single thing he did?

Yeah, that’s definitely what his personality would dictate.. narcissistic people would definitely not market themselves that way. Only through literally buying the “founder” title of a company that wasn’t even started by him.

Now you claim that he had a directing influence on almost every aspect - may I ask you where you get this information from?

I think his smallest problem is just being a conman selling this self-made billionaire image, while not being particularly bright in the first place. The real problem is his push for right wing propaganda (presumably for lower taxes) on twitter, but even previously, or licking putin’s ass, etc. These are another kind of moral failing, on which I can happily judge him on.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

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?”

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.

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

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.

idlez.amway.com!

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).

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"

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

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.

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/

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.

> 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.

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

Wasnt expecting that :(

Looks like nissan.com site is dead too, this is how it looked in 2020 https://web.archive.org/web/20200608045052/https://nissan.co...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonic_lodge

I want b.com because "Be dotcom!" sounded cool.

All the things I thought would have been too stupid to work seems to have been very profitable

Someone else made a comparison to phone numbers which turned out to be accurate. Simple sells.

Isn't that the truth. The amount of stupid ideas that have turned out to be wildly successful.

I strongly believe if there was original gTLDs and ccTLDs, internet would be a better place.

All the new TLDs removed scarcity from the system which didn’t provide any value.

I have a .red and a .me and never had an email field fail to validate.

I’d like to call it something different, and since many people say “x/twitter”, I guess others have similar thoughts.

I’m not unhappy that there are few other single letter domains, especially if they were to be claimed by corporations.

> Popularity continued to climb and Alexa was ranked in the top 100 in the mid-1990s. According to the Social Security Administration, its highest popularity, 39th, was achieved in 2006. The name's popularity decreased rapidly after Amazon picked it as the wake word of its voice service Amazon Alexa, which was released worldwide in 2016.

More at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/interactive/2021/p...

We didn't just all get the memo that that's the joke?

From Wikipedia about alphabet Inc

X is not a word.

If you had the opportunity to buy any unique letter domain name of your choice but you may choose only one, most people on this planet would chose X because it can mean anything.

Apple, Blackberry...

> This seems weird as the domain was sold in 2014 for 6.8M USD, which would be around 8.9M USD today taking inflation into account.

Caught my attention, 30% inflation in just 9 years...

I have far less confidence that x.com links will continue to work for years than twitter.com links.

Just like Prince.

> This wasn’t so much of a problem when Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC—lots of us already called it that

https://slate.com/business/2004/05/what-does-kfc-stand-for-n...

Twitter has always been Twitter

https://f.org/?page=rv

https://g.org/?page=rv

Coincidence ?

When domain names became big business, those rules were changed.

Another old rule is that the domain name could not start with a digit.

He's been looking for an excuse to use it ever since paypal.

It's still Twitter. There's no need to call it X unless you want to want to do free advertising for Musk's name change.

Nowadays kids only know it as the Rogers Centre and may have only heard Skydome from their parents. If X/Twitter is still around in 10 years (I’m pretty 50/50 on those odds) then I think it’ll be known officially and colloquially as X, not Twitter.

Changing the name to X was just a bad idea.

Until then calling it "twitter dot com" is still accurate.

The companies grew larger than their flagship product, so they created a new umbrella brand for the company to continue expanding with new products with their own identities.

Rather than throw out the decades of brand recognition and destroy the identity of their flagship product in order to make it serve as an umbrella for video calls or banking or whatever else is crammed into X.

https://www.reddit.com/r/hacking/comments/16yrggi/aorg/

Hmm.

its an honest mistake, please forgive me.

His last onscreen appearance was in "The World Is Not Enough" in 1999. So if you were born in the mid 90s, you probably missed it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oK4aBWIWl8

    All single octet length top level domain (TLD) names are reserved.
    Should the root zone ever get very large, there are technical
    solutions involving referral to servers providing splits of the zone
    based on the first name octet, which would be eased by having the
    single byte TLDs available.  In addition, these provide a potential
    additional axis for DNS expansion.  For like reasons, it is
    recommended that within TLD zones or indeed within any zone that is
    or might become very large, in the absence of a strong reason to the
    contrary, all single octet names be reserved.

"Before the current reserved name policy was imposed in 1993, Jon Postel (under the IANA function) took steps to reserve all available single character letters and numbers at the second level for future extensibility of the Internet (see 20 May 1994 email from Jon Postel, https://web.archive.org/web/20100301054658/http://ops.ietf.o...)"

Although I can't find off hand where he said about the corporations but I do vaguely remember reading that at some time as well, may be wrong on that specific point though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20030614022228/http://ops.ietf.o...

> Only three of the 26 possible single-letter domains have ever been registered under the .com domain, all before 1992. The other 23 single-letter .com domain names were registered January 1, 1992 by Jon Postel, with the intention to avoid a single company commercially controlling a letter of the alphabet.

"Everyone else was getting rich and these guys were trying to keep the infrastructure together," Kahle said.

And perhaps chase the Wikipedia citation to see what old article it use to quote.