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It has been almost a month since Twitter changed its name to X. A loud minority said that the platform was over, and a few days passed, and nothing really changed.
In fact, everyone has kept using the platform in the exact same way they did before, and people have almost forgotten about the change.
The trend of changing the name, especially in the tech industry, has always been a thing, but it never affected the firm negatively.
Yes, there might be a phase of adjustment, but once that phase is over, we realize that name changes don’t change the product we’re using.
Twitter is not the first company to do so. Below are the list of famous firms that got rebranded.
Meta (from Facebook)
You might remember that in 2021, people were going crazy for “Metaverse”.
Everyone was discussing the Metaverse extensively, and despite it being a hypothetical concept at that point, Mark Zuckerberg took a risk by investing in its potential.
The name from Facebook to Meta was changed on October 28, 2021. People were initially thrilled, but then confused when they realized Facebook was going all-in on Metaverse development.
The rebranding was intended to position the firm as the only owner of the Metaverse, but it has yet to pay dividends. However, the economy collapsed in 2022, causing lay-offs in Meta, and the tech industry has begun to play it safe with their money until everything levels out.
Either the name change will prove to be one of the brightest moves in history, or it will be the victim of a hype cycle that failed to deliver.
Google (from Backrub)
The most iconic company in the world in terms of the services it provides to its users. Whether it’s services like Gmail, Google Photos, and Google Drive, browsers such as Google Chrome, or the search engine, Google, the services of this company are used by billions.
Heck, the word “google”, as per the dictionary, means to search the internet for information.
Well, Google was not the first name that the team came up with. Google started as a web crawler that would scour for backlinks throughout the newly introduced World Wide Web. Since it would look for backlinks, the team named it Backrub. This was in 1996.
Eventually, they wanted to change the name to googol, which literally means the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros. While registering for the domain name, one of the members misspelled the term and entered Google.
Well, it stuck with the team, and they kept it, and the rest they say is history. In 2015, Google again rebranded itself as Alphabet, which was meant to be a holding company for its various other businesses.
eBay (from AuctionWeb)
In my opinion, eBay is still the world’s most popular auction site. It was launched in 1995 as AuctionWeb under an umbrella company called eBay Internet.
The company was founded by Pierre Omidyar with the intention of “bringing together buyers and sellers in an honest and open marketplace.”
The site became quite popular among people, who fondly started calling it eBay instead of AuctionWeb. The company’s name was officially changed to eBay in 1997.
Twitch (from Justin.tv)
In 2007, Justin Kan launched Justin.tv with the intention of live-streaming his life 24/7, but soon he gave all the users the ability to livestream anything they wanted.
Justin.tv began to focus more on gaming, and in 2011, the gaming category was separated into its own separate app called TwitchTV.
In 2014, Justin.tv, the name for the parent company at the time, was fully renamed to Twitch after growing exponentially.
Later in August 2014, Twitch was acquired by Amazon for $970 million.
Tinder (from MatchBox)
What began as a hackathon project in 2012 called MatchBox eventually became what we now know as the dating app, Tinder.
The team used the MatchBox name for the first six months of development but decided to modify it since it was too similar to their competition match.
In 2013, Jonathan Badeen added a swipe function in the Tinder app when he hopped out of the shower and wiped steam off the bathroom mirror.
After it rapidly fogged up once more, he swiped it in the opposite direction to clear it. Well, the UI permanently changed the way we engage with mobile applications.
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