X
(formerly known as Twitter) is a "microblogging" service introduced in 2006, where users post 280-character posts (formerly "tweets").note They can be mundane reporting on their life, a wry one-liner, or the start of an Internet campaign that will snowball and end up with international media coverage. Really, for just 280 characters, there's lots of potential.
The site had an open, public API that allowed for its adaptation and use on many different platforms. Android, iPhone, browser extension, desktop software, mobile phone... you can tweet from just about every device going. Hell, you can even monitor tweets with a typewriter! Most of the APIs are now either closed off entirely from third-party developers or require hefty payment.
The site is trendy. The real-time search function, which allows you to search all (public) tweets being made for any word or phrase you wish, is one of the most popular aspects of the site. This is combined with the "trending topics", a list of the ten most popular topics at the moment, based on how much they're being tweeted about. This list of trending topics will almost always include musical artists like Justin Bieber, at least until Twitter supposedly banned his name from trending and his fans made "let Bieber trend" a trend instead. When they were no longer able to do that, they resorted to trends like "Bustin Jieber". Still, Justin Bieber-related topics trend sporadically, and in 2012, they were joined by topics about British-Irish boy band One Direction.
Twitter has gotten a lot of media attention. Major events tend to be covered rapidly through the system, and it has become hip in Hollywood for a celebrity to have a Twitter account. Twitter nicknames get given out like email addresses. In fact, despite the Bieber/1Dmania, Twitter appears to be the first Friending Network type site (aside from work-oriented LinkedIn) in which thirtysomething media professionals outnumber teenagers. As of this writing, it is widely considered the most prolific social media platform on the internet, to the extent where its userbase is capable of having major impacts on the outside world, for better or for worse.
In late September 2017, for some users, Twitter increased the character count to 280. On November 7th, they finally enabled the option to everyone, replacing the previous, classic limit.
On April 25, 2022, Twitter agreed to a $44 billion takeover offer by Elon Musk (owner of Tesla Motors and SpaceX). However, Musk attempted to renegotiate the takeover three months later, prompting Twitter to sue Musk to enforce the original plan for acquisition; Musk ultimately agreed to go through with the takeover weeks before the trial was scheduled to begin.
On July 23, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Twitter would be rebranded as "X".note As a result, most references to Twitter-related terminology (including "tweet" and "retweet") were replaced by generic equivalents ("post"). Despite the rebranding, some parts of the site still refer to it as "Twitter", and even the site's domain name has remained twitter.com (with X.com redirecting).
You can follow TV Tropes on X, or browse TV Tropes X-style with the Laconic Wiki.
Works hosted on X
AdvertisingAlternate Reality Games
Arts
Blogs
- 3ème Droite
- dril
- jigsaw_quotes
- make up a guy
- Midnight Pals
- The Puppets Game
- Sonic the Hedgehog Twitter
- The Sun Vanished
- A Thread About How Much I Love Asriel
- Worst Muse
Fan Works
Webcomics
- Big Break (2019)
- Camp Counselor Jason
- Demon King GF
- Flower Knight 4-koma Theater
- Little Nuns
- Oni GF
- Tomboy GF
What's happening?!?:
- Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: When tweets were 140 characters, users often employed acronyms and abbreviations to fit the character limit. It got to the point where only avid Twitter users could understand what's happening, so Twitter eventually extended the character limit. Most of these shortcut words still persist, though they're used less often.
- Balance Buff: In 2017, Twitter reworked the character limit to get users of foreign-script languages (particularly East Asian languages, which can convey more in less characters) on even ground with those who don't use those languages, as multibyte characters each count as 2 characters under this new limit, while standard ASCII characters continue to count as 1 character. If you don't use any multibyte characters, you can put up to 280 characters into one tweet, but if you write entirely in Japanese, for example, you can still tweet only 140 characters.
- Beige Prose: It's impressive how much you can say within 280 characters, and even in 140 characters when it was the limit. Japanese and Chinese users can fit even more information into the limit due to how their language works.
- Game-Breaking Bug:
- As of August 31st, 2010, this has happened to any Twitter application only using Basic Authentication.
- The new OAuth implementation is broken itself. It basically requires the identification keys to be hard-coded into the clients, and Twitter has announced they are going to be de-authenticating compromised keys. And, yeah, the keys to the official Twitter client for Android are a string dump away.
- As if they weren't already suffering from an overly severe buttmonkeydom, Zune users had to wait 2 weeks for their official app to be fixed after the switchover.
- As of June 7, 2013, any app that does not use the version 1.1 API is dead, as Twitter permanently shut off API 1.0.
- Twitter for iPad does not allow you to accept follow requests for private accounts; you simply get a "forbidden" error. There have been no efforts to rectify this bug, even though it has existed for well over a year.
- Obvious Rule Patch: Following Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, he made it so that anyone who was subscribed to Twitter Blue would gain the Blue Checkmark, which deems them as a reliable source. Because of this, some savvy users managed to impersonate other people, including notable figures and companies. In response to this, the site later added a new checkmark tagged "Official" that clarifies them as the real person and not their impostor (Musk initially vetoed the "Official" tick a day after it was introduced, but the site reinstated it only days later due to Twitter Blue impersonators running rampant on the site).
- The Trope Formerly Known as X: As demonstrated by this very page, many outlets have taken this approach when discussing the platform post-rename. (Although, unlike the trope name, X is what it's currently known as.)
- "X" Makes Anything Cool: It was rebranded as simply "X" in 2023.
