Ask HN: Is Elon planning to redirect all Twitter URLs?
Putting aside what the majority thinks about the rebrand (I know it is bad), I'm curious about how he plans to make it work technically. Is he going to redirect all Twitter URLs correctly to the new X.com domain? Has anything of this scale ever been attempted before? What are the technical challenges and what would be the technical cost? Or will he just naively break the internet?
4 comments
Could have stopped at "Is Elon planning?" based on what Yaccarino said about "...X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine." she found out about X indirectly and there is no plan.
As you suspect, there's a ton of work involved in "rebranding" beyond just replacing a logo and a favicon. The domain is one. All the official accounts are also named @Twitter, @TwitterBusiness and so on. The name may pop up in software identifiers, URLs, names, app names & app icons. They've not even started on any of this work.
In fact, even their official brand kit is still... Twitter's brand kit. Unchanged: https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit
This is what happens when you rebrand with zero planning and without telling your own employees about it ahead of time.
Fixing all those "remnants" of the Twitter brand will take the work of hundreds of people countless days, and yes there's a risk of breakage, as with any change. Work and risks which are completely pointless, as it's a needless brand change.
It's still up in the air whether they'll start making real changes, like twitter.com redirecting to x.com instead of the other way around.
Why?
Because aside from being unprepared for it, a tons of problems are cropping up with the X brand, such as people's negative reaction to it, and the legal issues of thousands of companies in the US and around the world having registered the X trademark for various applications, including payment apps, video apps, chat apps, messaging apps.
This means if Musk proceeds, he may get a bunch of trademark violation lawsuits on top of all other lawsuits he's dealing with.
I expect in a week or two, he'll play it as "lol just kidding, it was a prank bro" and revert to the usual Twitter brand. He always does this when he screws up, and unfortunately I'm painfully aware of the pattern at this point.
Unfortunately he already defaced the Twitter signage on the SF office. But at this point we can only shrug and accept Twitter is going down the drain anyway, so who cares.
In fact, even their official brand kit is still... Twitter's brand kit. Unchanged: https://about.twitter.com/en/who-we-are/brand-toolkit
This is what happens when you rebrand with zero planning and without telling your own employees about it ahead of time.
Fixing all those "remnants" of the Twitter brand will take the work of hundreds of people countless days, and yes there's a risk of breakage, as with any change. Work and risks which are completely pointless, as it's a needless brand change.
It's still up in the air whether they'll start making real changes, like twitter.com redirecting to x.com instead of the other way around.
Why?
Because aside from being unprepared for it, a tons of problems are cropping up with the X brand, such as people's negative reaction to it, and the legal issues of thousands of companies in the US and around the world having registered the X trademark for various applications, including payment apps, video apps, chat apps, messaging apps.
This means if Musk proceeds, he may get a bunch of trademark violation lawsuits on top of all other lawsuits he's dealing with.
I expect in a week or two, he'll play it as "lol just kidding, it was a prank bro" and revert to the usual Twitter brand. He always does this when he screws up, and unfortunately I'm painfully aware of the pattern at this point.
Unfortunately he already defaced the Twitter signage on the SF office. But at this point we can only shrug and accept Twitter is going down the drain anyway, so who cares.
Also, I wonder if he'll throw a tantrum when he finds out that twitter's scale is big enough that he has to pay money to run nginix to do the URL rewriting. Or more likely, they already have a reverse proxy, but will discover that rewriting https://twitter.com/foo to https://x.com/foo takes processing time and they may have to add a few machines to the reverse proxy layer.
Amazon.com has a URL redirector that spits out quite a few 301's (can't remember if it also does 302, 307 or 308.) For example: https://www.amazon.com/OPFTEST2 sends a 301 redirect to https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452285186/ref=pd_sbs_14_t...
HAProxy, nginx and even Apache2 itself can somewhat easily rewrite the FQDN in an incoming URL. But you'll need a bunch of machines to do it. The definition of "bunch" depends on how much traffic you have and where it's coming from.
So... very much possible, but it will cost some money.
HAProxy, nginx and even Apache2 itself can somewhat easily rewrite the FQDN in an incoming URL. But you'll need a bunch of machines to do it. The definition of "bunch" depends on how much traffic you have and where it's coming from.
So... very much possible, but it will cost some money.