If you use Twitter you may have at sometime seen a tweet phrased like this: “Some people are the L1teraL w0rst!!??” Who are these people? What did they do to become “the L1terL w0rst?” Such is the subtweet, the weapon of choice for the Twitter user who wishes to condemn an individual or group of individuals, without being overly overt about it. It’s the best form of passive-aggressiveness. It seems Twitter has seen the value of the word enough to file a trademark for it.
A Trademark is a recognizable name, symbol, sign, etc. which distinguishes a product as coming from a particular source. It’s a commercial mark, meaning that Twitter’s control of it would exclusively be in commercial settings. So no one can name their new product “Subtweet” or sell things that say “Subtweet” on them.
While the word has been in use for a couple of years now, the trademark was initially filed back in October, shortly after Jack Dorsey was approved as CEO of the company, but it just recently got published for opposition; if no one opposes the trademark then it will likely be approved in less than a year, giving Twitter free reign to use the word “subtweet” in any commercial manner. Twitter will indeed have to keep using the word in the commercial setting so as to retain the trademark.
This is the latest in quite a few changes Twitter has undertaken, the most recent being dropping the “Favourites” button and replacing it with “Likes”. Hopefully Twitter is ahead of the class when it comes to trademarking “Subtweet”, something they failed when trying to trademark “Tweet” after app developers used it for ages.
