X, formerly known as Twitter

• pretty much wholesale rejection of the name change of the company is a heart-warming small act of solidarity
• I’ve seen references on both traditional and social media switched to ‘formerly known as Twitter’
• a lot of old site/blog templates etc that build in Twitter integration with hard-coded names and logos, you can see clearly now how recently infrastructures or content has been updated on a lot of legacy sites
• potential for wider problems with text searching and SEO and other methods of discoverability when considering usability
  • I’ve arbitrarily linked instances of the single letter X here to illustrate the problem
  • any phrase ‘X is Y’, logical arguments, arithmetic or algebra in plaintext/not code-escaped becomes an issue
  • especially bad for legacy systems with with inadequate text management
  • disambiguating a single letter word from a single letter (as with ‘I’)
  • company and brand names generally longer than a single character for trademark etc
  • letter x sometimes used as plaintext ‘exit’ button
  • may be used as a special character in other ways, or worse for screenreaders?