Some Notes on Twitter and "X"
It seems many people don't look into things in detail, so here are some notes and thoughts on the hellsite rebrand.
- Hellsite is burning through Wish.com Tony Stark's investors' money at an alarming rate. According to various reports they owe money for rent, more rent, severance, training and services, whiskey and swag.
- The domain twitter.com is actually managed by CSC DBS, who amongst other things to various DNS things and corporate name management. They're not your average GoDaddy type. They cost money that it appears Twitter may not have.
X.Com's history
The domain x.com was bought 30 years ago. Archive.org has some historical copies of the site from 1996, 1997, 1998, Spring 1999, and October 1999 where it fell into the hands of the current owner. The 1999 company was bought out by Confinity and eventually became Paypal before being sold to eBay with the x.com domain. You can rifle through the wayback machine to see the history as the domain was transferred around. Somewhere around the 13th of July 2015, the domain was transferred from Paypal to Domains By Proxy, The domain privacy service used by GoDaddy and Wild West Domains.
What Does This Mean?
Given that there are reports of unpaid service fees, if I had to guess I'd lean towards the idea that the rebrand is a way of avoiding paying CSC, or at least reducing their leverage over the main domain renewal as a negotiation tactic. Of course nobody knows the full inside state and I could be totally wrong - as with many things I hope I am.
By far my favourite take on the Internet is this one. Whether it's called Twitter or X doesn't matter. It's still an unpolished turd.