Google forgets to check @alphabet account on Twitter and the alphabet.com domain
US tech giant Google announced overnight that it would rebrand itself with the creation of a new umbrella company called Alphabet, leading to new-found fame for one Twitter user.
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Read more: Google rebrands as Alphabet and appoints new CEO
As Google forgot to check the availability of the @alphabet account on Twitter, there was some confusion in the aftermath of the announcement as the owner of the account gained fame.
Chris Andrikanich, whose tweets usually receive about one retweet and one favourite mark, received nearly 996 mentions in a 40-minute interval.
The self-described “Dad. Husband. Self-proclaimed geek who fires off regular gibberish, gobblety-gook about sports, tech, CLE, and whatever” saw the day finishing as an “interesting way”.
Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday...
— Chris Andrikanich (@alphabet) August 10, 2015
Although Alphabet's new CEO, and co-founder of Google, Larry Page commented that Alphabet had been given because it meant a “collection of letters that represent language, one of humanity’s most important innovations, and is the core of how we index with Google search!”, the company also forgot to check the alphabet.com URL.
Now neither Google nor Alphabet own alphabet.com, but since 1997 BMW does.
Therefore, Alphabet will be hosted in the abc.xyz domain, hammering traffic into BMW group's domain.
Google's co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page said they will lead the new company as president and CEO of Alphabet respectively, while Google itself will become an operating unit under the control of a new CEO, Sundar Pichai, who had been running Android and Chrome.
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