What is Twitter (now X): origin, subscription modalities and most useful tools

Twitter, now known as X after the company was purchased by Elon Musk, is one of the most popular social networks of the moment, giving its name to terms such as tweet that Spanish has adopted as its own thanks to its widespread use.

Interestingly, this platform was originally going to focus on podcasts, but almost immediately the management team decided to focus on short posts, something essential in the age of SMS, where every word was essential to avoid paying extra.

If you want to know everything about Twitter, now X, you’ve come to the right place. I’ll tell you how it was born, what you can do on the platform and the most useful tools to get the most out of it.

The birth of Twitter

As often happens with historical events where there is no evidence beyond oral testimonies, The birth of Twitter is not entirely clearas both its founders and executives tell somewhat different stories.

The official story, as you can read in this article from Business Insider Spaingoes back to Evan Williams, a former Google employee who had founded Odeo, a startup dedicated to podcasting. Along with Biz Stone and Jack Dorsey, Williams decided to banish Odeo after the launch of iTunes podcasting.

Apple was (and is) a rival to beat, so they decided to change course. According to the official story, this is where Twitter was born. However, Other close sources report that the founder of Odeo was Noah Glassan entrepreneur who had his operations center in his own home.

Later, investors transferred their confidence to the newly created platform, and Williams came on board as an investor. At this point, the company moved its safe house from Glass’s apartment to Williams’s.

Following its initial success and having moved into an office, the well-known Jack Dorsey arrived, who was in charge of web design, along with Blaine Cook, the company’s engineer, with Williams as CEO of the business.

The year was 2005 and Apple had launched its own podcast platform, so investors and the board decided that it was not a good idea to compete against one of the biggest technological giants in the market.

Thus, despite the fact that Glass had been a key figure in the birth of the platform – originally known as Twttr – Dorsey would remain, unfairly, as the main founder of the company.

In any case, all that network of personal quarrels ended up developing one of the most important social networks in the history of the Internet.

What is Twitter

Although Twitter was born as a project based on podcasts, it quickly became a social network for what is known as microblogging, that is, publications that did not exceed 140 characters, at a time when SMS was the order of the day.

As a result of its almost immediate success, His posts acquired a name of their own, becoming known as tweets.a term that the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) included in the dictionary of the Spanish language.

On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk acquired Twitter for 41 billion euros to completely change the platform, with Linda Yaccarino as CEO since June 2023. At that time, the social network made an important change to its name, and began to be called X.

Why Twitter is called X

Twitter’s blue bird gave way to a more transparent black and white X logo after Musk’s purchase. It also changed its names: retweeting became republishing, and tweeting became posting.

However, you will still hear tweet and the old terms, due to the huge popularity of the network in its infancy and early years.

According to X Corp, the company behind X, This symbol is explained by 3 reasons: refers to a crossroads; it is a letter that appears in many languages, and is usually written to mean a path that still has a long way to go.

The official domain change, however, came months later. By May 17, 2024, the site was officially renamed X.com.

How to create a Twitter account

To create an account on what is now known as X, you have to follow the same steps that existed with Twitter. In any case, creating your account is completely free, although there are subscription options once you are in.

If you want to create a user, follow these steps:

1. Access the domain X.com and select the button Register.
2. When a pop-up box appears, click on Create your account; From here, X will give you instructions on how to access your new account, for which you will have to provide personal data such as your name, telephone number or email address.
3. X will send you an email to verify your address. Once your identity is verified, you can enter your profile information.

Once inside, you will be able to access extra features if you have verified X.

How to get verified X (Twitter)

Before the change to X, any Twitter user with an active, relevant, and authentic account could access the blue checkmark that appears next to the account name. After the change to X, this feature became a paid feature, under the name X Premium.

Today, the eligibility criteria to access the verified in X have changed. These are the ones the company mentions on its own website:

• Have a completed account with a visible name and profile picture.
• Have an account that has been activated for at least 30 days to access the subscription.
• Have a confirmed phone number for account security.
• You must not have any misleading content. Your account cannot have any recent changes to the profile photo, must have a visible name and must not have been suspected of violating the platform’s rules or spam.

As for the different prices of this subscription, there are 3 options:

• Basic for 3 euros per monthYou’ll have the essential features of Premium and will be able to edit and write longer posts, save folders with items or prioritize certain responses, among others.
• Premium for 8 euros per month. The same features as the Basic model, but with a check mark, plus seeing fewer ads, requesting a share of advertising and subscription revenue, accessing ID verification, and being able to use Grok, X’s AI.
• Premium+ for 16 euros per monthIt includes the features of Premium, but adds other interesting ones such as the elimination of ads on the For You and Following pages, as well as the possibility of prioritizing any response and accessing Articles.

Most useful tools if you use Twitter

With the arrival of the premium model of X, the tools that the platform made available to users also changed. Some of these tools were now integrated with the subscription.

However, in addition to these, there are others that are not specific to the platform, from which you can analyze your impact on the platform or delete the tweets you prefer to delete. These are the most useful tools if you use X:

• Tweetbind. With this tool external to X, you will be able to access Basic statistics of your campaigns on the platformAdditionally, you can get a report of up to 200 posts from the last 7 days by simply typing a hashtag, tweet or username into the search bar. Companies that rely on this tool include major names such as Spotify, Disney, Google or La Liga, among many others.
• Metricool. This paid tool is also one of the best known for performing analysis of different publications on Twitter. It is Official partner of Google, Meta and Xwith which the integration is more than remarkable. Among its functionalities, you will be able to access an AI assistant, track different hashtags or plan publications.
• X Pro. If you have X Premium, this is a tool Available with your subscriptionFrom there, you will have several timelines on the same screen, with access to tracking and organizing content, as well as being able to interact with communities in real time.
• Hootsuite. Like others, it not only has measurements exclusively from X, but also from other platforms. With it, you can create social advertising campaigns, create content with AI –which you must label as such–, know the best times to publish or see what people are talking about.
• Tweet Deleter. If you’re looking to delete a post from the past, or even a group of posts with a single click, this tool is a must-have. Thanks to it, you won’t have to search through your entire timeline, but rather You will be able to delete the posts that you no longer want to have. from the same page, much more conveniently than in X.

Differences between Twitter and other social networks

Since its inception, Twitter has differentiated itself in several ways from other platforms that have become competitors over time, such as Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, to which are added more recent ones such as Threads, which is more similar to the current X.

First of all, X is very different from vertical video platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. While characters and threads are essential in the former, the main content in the latter is the audiovisual resources.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t find X-rated videos, although that’s not the main reason for the platform. However, unlike these, in X there is explicit contentclassified as NSFW, something prohibited in the others.

In second place, Facebook is the most similaralthough Meta’s platform has tried to clearly differentiate itself from X, with new tools that do not appear in Elon Musk’s platform, and vice versa.

So, one of the features of X that you won’t see in any other is the Community Notesfrom which any user who has correctly rated 5 notes of this type will be able to compose a public message for everyone, adding important context or additional sources.

However, these notes have not been free of controversy, since Musk’s arrival at X many users have criticized the improper use of these, in addition to hate speech on the platform that goes unnoticed.

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Tags: Twitter, Elon Musk