“For all these reasons, I find it likely that Bluebird will succeed in strictly proving that X Corp. has discontinued bona fide use of the Tweet mark and Bird logo,” Connolly wrote, denying X’s motion to block the uses.
New Twitter quickly rebrands
In a press release provided to Ars, Operation Bluebird President Stephen Coates celebrated the outcome.
“They kept the word,” Coates said. “They let go of the bird, and they let go of the tweet.”
Durk Barnhill, Operation Bluebird’s chief marketing officer, told Ars that “we think this is huge a win” and confirmed that the rival app was immediately renamed following the court’s order.
Operation Bluebird had already launched a domain, twitter.new, but the August 26 launch was not mentioned as part of the court proceedings, so the judge did not directly discuss how his order might impact the rival service.
Despite the judge’s silence, Operation Bluebird has already rebranded, declaring in a press release that “Tweet.App” will be the platform’s new name.
Users unaware of the rebrand may experience issues accessing the new site, though. On early Thursday, Ars noted that twitter.new was redirecting to tweet.app, but, as of this writing, has reverted to a page that previously used the Twitter name to encourage users to sign up for handles. Barnhill confirmed that Operation Bluebird is working through bugs, so likely the redirect will be fixed soon.
Apart from the name of the app, nothing else has changed for the 172,000 users who have already requested handles, the press release said.
For Operation Bluebird, the goal is to launch a service to rival Musk’s that is member-owned, rather than billionaire-owned and controlled. For $20, users can join and get rid of X’s “trust problem,” the tweet.app site said.