8 ms·
X.com (2000)
- losthubble 3y agoWhat's the point of this if it just redirects to twitter.com??
- hxii 3y agoI get this is related to the whole Twitter -> X -> Twitter thing, but what is the discussion here?
- Vecr 3y agoThis is Elon Musk's website. As far as I can tell ownership was transferred to PayPal and then Elon bought it back reasonably soon after that.
- seumars 3y agoOne can only wonder how much this domain is worth today.
- madars 3y agoOne can only speculate as there are only two other single-letter .com's (q.com and z.com) and there won't be others [1] . Wiki article says "GMO Internet, Inc. purchased Z.com for nearly $6.8 million from Nissan, who previously used it for the Nissan Z series cars." [2] For comparison, asking price for b.org or r.org are $500k but .org's typically command less than .com's. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom... [2] https://www.thedomains.com/2014/11/21/z-com-sold-for-6-8-million-dollars/ https://www.thedomains.com/2014/11/21/z-com-sold-for-6-8-mil...
- Atheros 3y agoIt has to be worth a lot less than that today. The number of young people who visit websites ever in any given week is dropping. Reddit's usage among young people shot up after mobile apps were developed for it, not before. Domains just don't matter as much anymore.
- lesuorac 3y agoI suspect the real thing that'll hurt its price is people are realizing websites can end in stuff besides `.com`. i.e. MrBeast (~XX M views) had a recent video sponsored by the `.store` registry.
- jonas-w 3y agoAs I mentioned in another comment [0], a domain which looks like X.com but is a Unicode X https://xn--vm8a.com/ https://xn--vm8a.com/ can be bought for 9,000,000 USD and I'd think that the real X.com is worth much more, as it doesn't get converted to puny code [1]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36844079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36844079 [1]: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode
- yalogin 3y agoI don’t understand how Twitter and the X idea overlap. Elon just wants to use the existing user base to seamlessly switch to the new app. If that’s the only reason he is bulldozing Twitter into X, feels like a bad idea. With his celebrity (though severely diminished) he can pull in a lot of interest to X as a new company. That would have automatically added a few billion in value for him. Instead trying to morph Twitter into X reduces Twitter’s value and doesn’t net anything positive at all. I don’t get this madness
- evbogue 3y agoIt's the same thing as Nostr, wanting to tie payments to identities.
- happytiger 3y agoThat’s it. KYC with a head start of a 220M user base. 5% of that is a massive force in fintech.
- jnsaff2 3y agoLights are one but no one is home. It’s a bit pointless trying to reverse engineer some sense out of the whims of some people who think very highly of themselves.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoI think it's because he was financially successful with PayPal and he wants to duplicate that success, so he's always been trying to break back into the money flows and this was too juicy of an idea to merge the two.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoAs Tom Nicholas (the British YouTuber) pointed out, a chat app that's used by the vast majority of the population (like WeChat in China, or perhaps in some countries WhatsApp) can add a payments method and be successful, but Twitter has only ever been a niche. An influential niche, popular with journalists and celebrities, but a niche nonetheless. A chat app first needs the massive audience, and to be a normal way to send private messages to people you know in real life, before it can become a successful payments app. WhatsApp could perhaps do it, but most of the countries where WhatsApp is popular already have decent payments infrastructure.
- RyJones 3y agoIt used to be single-letter TLDs couldn't be registered. Here is a look into the current status I did a bit ago: https://github.com/ryjones/single-letter-tlds https://github.com/ryjones/single-letter-tlds
- upon_drumhead 3y agoIt's actually more accurate to say that it used to be that single-letter TLDs could be registered, however > 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. and > On December 1, 1993, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) explicitly reserved the remaining single-letter and single-digit domain names. The few domains that were already assigned were grandfathered in and continued to exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-letter_second-level_dom...
- RyJones 3y agoThank you for the clarification!
- terrortang 3y agoI recently finished reading "The PayPal Wars". The book recounts an interesting episode regarding PayPal's history where Elon Musk pursued his vision of rebranding PayPal as X.com. Despite his efforts, the initiative was not successful, ultimately leading to his resignation from the CEO position. It remains to be seen whether history has the tendency to repeat these kinds of events.
- mandeepj 3y ago> ultimately leading to his resignation from the CEO position. You sure about that? Pretty much everywhere else - it’s written and said - he was FIRED!
- upon_drumhead 3y agoCEOs never get fired. They always decide to spend more time with their family and resign.
- terrortang 3y agoI think referring to a CEO's termination as 'resignation' is a somewhat diplomatic way of implying that they were actually dismissed from their position.
- laserbeam 3y agoI just gotta say this... Musk's kid (X) is going to have a horrible bullied childhood through no fault of his own. Good job, Elon... Well played...
- poisonborz 3y agoThis idea of "why doesn't the west have a WeChat-like app" (which X is supposed to be eventually) is so shallow that I have trouble believing there is any corporate support behind it besides Elon. As he's seemingly pushing his successful space & EV business under this parent brand, it would be a strange hill to die on.
- jonas-w 3y agohttps://ꓫ.com/ https://xn--vm8a.com/ (https://xn--vm8a.com/ https://xn--vm8a.com/) which is not the twitter X.com can be bought for 9,000,000 USD This will be interesting if someone will buy it. EDIT: HN automatically converts to puny code that's good. The letter X in that other domain looks like this: https://www.compart.com/de/unicode/U+A4EB https://www.compart.com/de/unicode/U+A4EB You can copy and paste it and add .com and see that it is the same as the puny code URL mentioned above.
- popcorncowboy 3y agoThe design nostalgia is real. When websites still borrowed their design motif from bulletin board systems. <3
- baybal2 3y ago[dead]
- robbywashere_ 3y agoIf he wanted to make all these sweeping changes then why did he alienate his staff? Can you imagine all the time and money that was put into staffing Twitter? There is value to an organization and its unwritten human network upon which it operates. Then it was just blown away over night to appease some beanie wearing mouth breathers on the platform
- sshine 3y agoFiring all those people is undoubtedly risky; Twitter’s unpaid office rent is an example of a consequence of that. But the assessment was that there were way too many people to solve the task of running Twitter. And Twitter is still running.
- astrange 3y agoIt sure wasn't running last week when it didn't load half the time I tried it. (Some of that time it was trying to serve me intranet pages.)
- zpeti 3y agoThere might be some outages, but still, Twitter as an entity is operating just fine, if Elon's claims are correct time spent on twitter is at record highs, and similarweb doesn't show any real decrease in visitors: https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic https://www.similarweb.com/website/twitter.com/#traffic Reddit, Twitter, Facebook all had outages in the beginning all the time, it's not a deal breaker for heavily network effect products. So really, yes, getting rid of some staff has caused outages, but it's also sped up development of new features, and not really affected usage.
- wun0ne 3y agoWhat new features? Rate-limiting? $8 blue check amplification? Advertiser haemorrhage?
- 3y ago
- astrange 3y agoThis is an interesting case of ignoring Twitter's second biggest market - Twitter Japan can't be called X Japan because that's already the name of the most famous rock band in the country.