X has abandoned the Twitter brand, Operation Bluebird wants to own it

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X has abandoned the Twitter brand, Operation Bluebird wants to own it

13 December 2025

An American startup called Operation Bluebird is hoping to take ownership of the defunct Twitter name, the term “tweet”, and famous blue bird logo, and relaunch Twitter anew. Operation Bluebird’s backers believe the old micro-blogging service can be restored to its former glory, and revive the “town square” the old Twitter once, for a time, gave the web.

I like the idea, but how feasible is it? Just crazy enough that it might work?

While X no longer uses the Twitter branding, they would still own it, despite Operation Bluebird’s claims it has been “abandoned”. I somehow doubt the present owner, Elon Musk, of what was once Twitter, X, sees things that way though. He would expect to see a very generous offer, before even beginning to consider parting with the Twitter branding.

It will be a hard sell, or a hard buy. Twitter branding aside, Musk believed as the buyer of Twitter, he also owned the micro-blogging concept. When Threads launched in 2023, Musk threatened to sue Meta, claiming Threads was a copy of X. Little came of that, but it says a lot about Musk’s resolve.

Selling the Twitter branding to someone who wants to establish a direct competitor to X, doesn’t seem like the sort of thing anyone would do, let alone Musk. But Musk has given X its own, quite distinct, identity. Everyone knows who owns X, and what it is about. It almost seems there could be little confusion if a new version of Twitter were launched, so entrenched is X as a brand.

Musk bought Twitter three years ago, but it seems like a lifetime ago. X is X now. It is no longer the old Twitter. Still, Operation Bluebird must have some idea of what they’re up against. Yet they think there’s a chance of success, taking control of the Twitter branding, as fanciful as it might seem.

Still, I’ve requested my preferred username (you’ll never guess…), and would be keen to be involved in the new Twitter if it ever happened. Twitter, to me, seemed to be the ideal accompaniment to a blog. It was a great place to go and mingle with others with similar interests. Town square, indeed.

It was neither too much, nor too little.

To my mind, nothing else was needed. I once set up a Facebook page for disassociated, but could never get enthusiastic about it. Ditto the prospect of having presences on the likes of YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Linkedin, and Pinterest. That was like five places too many to be spread across. Plus none of then were particularly relevant to a site like mine.

Despite having my fingers crossed for Operation Bluebird, I still can’t help feeling that the “Twitter moment” in general is gone, as exciting as bringing back the early Twitter is. It seems like the micro-blogging site was part of a web that no longer exists. While Mastodon and Bluesky are fine latter-day variants, they’re not what Twitter was.

So I wonder: could (new) Twitter, were it ever to eventuate, ever be what old Twitter was?

Rage bait named word of 2025 by Oxford University Press

8 December 2025

The term has been in use since 2002, and originally expressed a driver’s frustration towards another driver, who had indicated they wished to overtake them, by flashing their car headlights. Certain types of web content have seen the term’s context change somewhat:

Rage bait is defined as “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content”.

Rage bait of the frustrating variety can often be found on Threads, where posts typically say something like: “what’s just happened?”, or “I’m so over this”, without a shred of context. This leaves people to ask “what’s just happened where?”, or “you’re so over what?”

The posts might be senseless, but they get the engagement.

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language, social media, trends

What happened to Problogger and Darren Rowse?

8 December 2025

A reader contacted me a few days after I mentioned blogging resource Problogger, and founder Darren Rowse, in a recent post. They were wondering if I knew anything about what’s happened at the site, or to Rowse himself, as no new content seems to have been posted since June 2024.

For those coming in late, Problogger was, or still is, one of the preeminent blogging resource sites, helping people who want to make money from writing online. The publication was launched by Melbourne based Australian blogger Rowse in 2004.

Despite being dated June 2024 though, some of the recent Problogger posts were actually much older. A few I looked at had — judging by the age of the comments — been written in 2008, and were re-posts. Evergreen content. But there was nothing — as far as I could see — indicating the site was taking either a temporary break, or ceasing operation all together.

It seems odd that a website with the profile of Problogger would suddenly fall silent, for no apparent reason. Of course long running single author blogs take breaks now and again, whether for personal or family reasons, or because the writer simply wants some time out.

Publishing content regularly is no small ask, as anyone who does so will tell you.

A look at the Problogger open-to-all Facebook page likewise revealed nothing. The last entry there, as of the time I type, is dated December 2024. The Twitter/X page however is a little more active, the last post I saw there (login may be required to view) was dated 18 November 2025.

But a Twitter/X post made on 15 April 2024 seems to answer the question of what’s become of both Problogger and Rowse: he’s now a church pastor, or at least is part time. As Rowse points out though, this is not exactly a new role, and was something he was doing prior to launching Problogger over twenty years ago. This might be him going back to his roots, perhaps.

I’m not sure what this means for the future of the Problogger website, given Rowse doesn’t appear to have said anything one way or the other as yet. There are still plenty of blogging related posts on his Twitter/X page, which might suggest Problogger will be revived sometime in the future. But until something official is said, Problogger readers will have to wait and see what happens.

On the plus side, even though posting seems to have paused, the website remains online, and content is still there to access. While it’s not quite my thing, it would still be unfortunate if twenty-plus years of information were to be taken offline.

As an aside, I also found out Rowse has been exploring how AI can be of use to religious leaders (Threads post). This might be of interest to people curious as to how religion and AI can intersect.

Spotify listeners shun Australian music says Wrapped 2025

5 December 2025

The suggestion, made by The Daily Aus (TDA), is that few Australians listened to local music in 2025. On Spotify at least.

Zero local acts featured in Australia’s most listened-to artists, tracks, and albums on Spotify in 2025.

You’ll have to go to Instagram (IG) to read the slide card since TDA mainly publish their news reporting on IG, because their target audience, mainly Generation Z and some Millennials, consume news and current affairs reporting on the socials.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, the world needs more niche blogs, and TDA, with their fine writing would slot nicely into news and current affairs niche. They do republish articles to their website, but sadly there is no RSS feed to subscribe to.

But back to the headline. I checked my 2025 Spotify Wrapped, and found Moon Motion, by Brisbane based Australian act First Beige (er, Instagram page), was my second most listened to track this year.

Tame Impala, Peking Duk, RÜFÜS DU SOL, and Vera Blue, are among Australian acts on my liked songs playlist. I can’t be the only person in Australia with local acts on their playlist.

It seems surprising to me that not one floated to the top, or at least near it, on the overall most-listened to lists. But maybe it’s some sort of Spotify quirk, and maybe next year we won’t be talking so much about them.

I also learned I have a music listening age of twenty-two (thank-you Spotify), why then all this talk about niche-blogs and RSS feeds? At my “age” I’m meant to be all in the socials.

Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

4 December 2025

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites.

With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was founded last year, but has a growing membership.

Their goals are similar however, says Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).

Bad design trends: hotel rooms without bathroom doors

2 December 2025

Bring Back Doors. A hopefully growing list of hotels where there are doors to the room’s bathroom.

I’ve emailed hundreds of hotels and I asked them two things: do your doors close all the way, and are they made of glass? Everyone that says yes to their doors closing, and no to being made of glass has been sorted by price range and city for you to easily find places to stay that are guaranteed to have a bathroom door.

I’m trying to think how this — hotel rooms without bathroom doors — became a thing.

Did an architect stay at the once sole establishment in the world that did not have bathroom doors in the room, and thought: now there’s an idea, I must incorporate it into my future hotel room designs.

One thing led to another, and suddenly bathrooms sans doors were a trend. A terrible trend.

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Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog

1 December 2025

Dave Winer, an American software developer and blogger, is working on a blog discourse system. In short, this is a blog commenting system, allowing you to comment on someone’s else blog post, potentially this one you’re reading right now, but via your own blog or website:

The first thing to know is that all comments are blog posts. You write the comment on a blog that you own. And maybe that will be the only way anyone other than you will ever see it. But you don’t have to “go” to the blog to write the comment. You stay right where you are.

Presumably, if someone writes a comment, that is actually a post on their blog, in reply to something I’ve written here, I’m notified in some way. Further, I can then allow that comment/blog post to appear as a comment on my website, if I so decide. But there’s nothing new about writing responses to another person’s blog post, on your own blog.

Once upon a time, the only way to “comment” publicly on someone else’s blog post, or rather, an online journal entry, as they were once called, was to write a post on your website in response. This is because early blogs didn’t have commenting facilities. Back then, the tool closest to permitting any sort of on-site public interaction between website writers and visitors, were guestbooks.

But guestbooks — intended really only to allow visitors to leave brief, and usually complimentary messages — were hardly an appropriate forum for discussing blog posts, particularly if these conversations were in-depth and involved numerous participants. But unless a visitor told the writer about their post-in-response, just about the only way a writer might find out was through their referrer logs.

But writing blog posts as comments is a practice that has somewhat been revived by the IndieWeb/SmallWeb community. A blogger might respond to this post, on their website, using the title “Re: Dave Winer: to comment on a blog you need to have a blog”. They might also send a pingback, a webmention, or an email, advising me of their blog post.

Being able to reply to blog posts with comments though made for a convenient way to host a centralised discussion about an article, rather than having fragments of it scattered across the web. Centralisation can have some benefits. Readers no longer needed a website to respond to a blog post, and often only had to supply an email address, whether real or not, to air their thoughts.

And so the discussion flowed.

But we all know what happened next. Free-for-all commenting was a boon for spammers. Winer’s blog discourse system would create a hurdle for spammers, who likely would not have a website they could post comments to. Of course, serious comment spammers could setup a blog to publish their spam to, but perhaps the discourse system will have a way for dealing with that.

The blog discourse system also addresses another matter few people give much thought to: comment, and by definition content, ownership. Who “owns” a comment I leave on someone else’s blog? Me, or the website owner? If I append my name, I am identified as the writer — am I not? — and intellectual rights and what not, are mine, even though the publication is not.

Most likely that is the case. Perhaps though, somehow, someone with the same name as me, might claim the comment as theirs, particularly if they see some value in it. I don’t know how often that sort of thing happens, if at all, probably never, or incredibly rarely. But if my comments in reply to other people’s posts are published at my website, and then “syndicated” as an approved comment, the possibility of ownership conflict is removed.

What I wonder about though, is where do the comments I write, which are a response to a post on another person’s blog, end up on my website? Will these be funnelled into a separate content stream? I’m not sure I like the idea of comments intended for other blogs, featuring on the main feed of my blog, amongst my regular posts, even if I did compose the comments.

And will differing content management systems be able to talk each other? For instance will a comment-post made on a WordPress blog, post seamlessly onto, say, a Ghost blog? What of bona fide commenters who do not have blogs? Questions remain to be answered then. But I’m looking forward to finding out more about Winer’s discourse system, and seeing it in action.

AI slop named word of 2025 by Macquarie Dictionary

29 November 2025

The Australian dictionary’s word of the year committee were scathing, to say the least, of their pick:

We understand now in 2025 what we mean by slop — AI generated slop, which lacks meaningful content or use. While in recent years we’ve learnt to become search engineers to find meaningful information, we now need to become prompt engineers in order to wade through the AI slop. Slop in this sense will be a robust addition to English for years to come. The question is, are the people ingesting and regurgitating this content soon to be called AI sloppers?

I’d hoped Macquarie Dictionary would make IndieWeb their word for 2025. Enshittification, by the way, was the 2024 word of the year.

Feeds and algorithms have freed us from personal websites

26 November 2025

For another point of view, sorry POV, which I suggest you should read in full, Germany based linguist and writer, Burk:

People stopped typing URLs. Entirely. No one goes to “juliawrites.com” anymore. They go to TikTok. Or Substack. Or Medium. Or Twitter. Or anything that has a feed and an algorithm.

Well most people stopped, obviously. But I still sometimes type “juliawrites.com”. And “TikTok.com/@juliawrites”. Rather than using the TikTok app (yet to install it), so I can see the page of the person I want to, instead of the algorithm serving up what it decides to.

Ditto “Instagram.com”, where the website trumps the app when it comes to user experience any day. I see only what I want to see. And then leave. I seldom go to Substack. I do look in on Twitter sometimes, and Medium, where I have an (unused) account, and read Burk’s article.

I don’t hear too many people saying they like algorithms, at least in a web content context.

But this is the web, and if you want to write something like that on your website, your Substack and/or Medium page, or that algorithm infested swamp that is the socials, you’re free to do so.

As for “forcing” readers to learn the “design quirks” of your personal website, you could always encourage them to subscribe to the RSS feed instead (even if it’s an algorithm-free feed).

Via Michael Gale, whose personal website is here.

Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

22 November 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

Uni Watch, which has been online in one form or another since 1999, announced its closure a few weeks ago. At first it seemed the entire website, including archived content, was to be removed within days, but in a later post, founder Paul Lukas said the site’s future remained unclear. There’s a suggestion Uni Watch might continue publishing, though that is still far from certain.

The survival of niche interest websites and blogs, such as Uni Watch, are, in my opinion, vital for the future of the web, as I wrote the other day.

It is of course unreasonable to think every owner operated website, or those with a small team of writers, that began publishing decades ago, will keep going forever. What’s unfortunate is the format, niche/speciality blogging, seems to increasingly be regarded as passé.

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