X ditches Twitter from its official handles as changeover continues

After changing its logo, X changed its official handles from ‘@Twitter’ to ‘@X’. Access to the old Twitter handle is no longer available and it now states, “This account is no longer active. Follow @X for updates”.  

All the past tweets from the old official handle are now available under ‘@X’. The company has also dropped ‘Twitter’ from its Blue subscription service, which will now be called Blue Subscription and its handle has also changed to ‘@XBlue’. 

In addition to this, most of the old official Twitter accounts have either removed the word Twitter from their names or changed it to X. For example, @Support, @Xdevelopers, and @API are the new names for @TwitterSupport, @TwitterDev and @TwitterAPI.

The ‘@X’ account belonged to Gene X Hwang, a photographer/videographer from Orange Photography, until yesterday, as reported by a media organisation. 

Hwang said that X wrote him an email saying that the ‘@X’ account is related to X Corp., so he would get a new handle. The company also said it would move all his data, including followers and following data, to his new handle. They also gave him the option to reply to the email to tell X if he preferred any other handle. The company thanked him with merch and an offer to visit HQ if he wanted to meet the X people, as reported by TechCrunch.

Online usernames that are highly sought-after can fetch thousands of dollars when sold on a secondary marketplace. However, Hwang did not get any money from X. 

“It would have been nice for them to compensate for it since it did have a lot of value to me, but things are what they are,” TechCrunch quotes Hwang as saying. “Maybe I should ask for the bird from the sign since they were dismantling that yesterday too,” Hwang joked.

Meanwhile, X users can now download videos shared by other users on the platform. This new feature is available to Twitter Blue subscribers only.

“Verified users can download videos from certain Tweets for offline viewing, or to get creative and remix these videos to create new content,” according to an article on X Help Centre.

All new videos can be downloaded by verified X users unless the uploader chooses not to allow it. Also, this feature will not work for verified account users who are under the age of 18 years. 

Furthermore, X has introduced a new privacy setting, which will enable Twitter Blue subscribers to set their accounts to private. Once enabled this feature will allow only their approved followers to view and download their videos.