Caged Blue Bird?

Talk about changes on Twitter, and the biggest changes may not have come yet. The blue bird, synonymous with the micro-blog platform, seems to be out of the cage as Elon Musk tweaks his $44 billion buyout. “And very soon we’ll be saying goodbye to the Twitter brand and slowly all the birds,” he tweeted on Sunday. “If a good X logo is posted tonight, it can go live on Monday,” he tweeted. It appears the rebranding exercise is underway, though the way Twitter is run means it’s never easy to predict what comes next. Timing suggests this is a defensive response by Meta to the launch of Threads, a “cage battle” that could undermine its micro-blog monopoly. The flight of users to this new rival will depend on Threads’ ability to generate a user-gets-user network effect, which, while clearly boosted by Meta’s Instagram reach, remains its bigger challenge. A possible truce could take the shape of both the platforms being interoperable for a sizable joint network and shared benefits. This could give rise to a social media giant. The no-confidence officers will have to take a serious view on this. Even tacit cooperation will need to be monitored, no matter how noisy this online battle is.