
A shoeshine guy who guards some of Twitter’s most desirable geographic handles - antr
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02/19/meet-the-spanish-shoeshine-guy-who-secretly-guards-twitters-greatest-real-estate/
======
_k
I registered a few Twitter accounts as well. Approximately 10 or so. Here's
what happened :

I used my accounts and Twitter kept growing and growing. I updated my personal
account several times a month. Another one was updated on a daily basis. My
other accounts usually got updated every few months.

Then one day I got a DM from someone asking me whether I was interested in
selling the account he was sending a DM to. I told him I had no intention of
selling. Thank you for asking.

I didn't even ask him to name a price cause I wanted to use the account on one
of my projects. So whatever his price was going to be, I couldn't care less.

Fast forward a few months of inactivity and it turns out I can no longer
access my account AND a big media company is using it.

I was shocked but I remembered the guy's name so I Googled it. It turns out he
was the CEO of the media company who hacked my account !

I should clarify he probably didn't hack it. The password was just too
difficult so he must have pulled a few strings in order to get it done.

~~~
jlgaddis
Twitter says that inactive accounts (six months with no activity) may be
removed at any time, although their web site also says that they don't grant
requests to take over inactive accounts (with an exception regarding
trademarks).

~~~
wyclif
My wife has a coveted three-letter username, and recently tweeted for the
first time in almost five years. That's right: for almost five years the
account was completely unused, and Twitter did nothing. I think that's the
right way to handle things.

So Twitter _may_ remove accounts, and I know this is anecdotal and one data
point is meaningless, but from observing this and other accounts it seems they
rarely remove accounts for no activity. Unless, of course, it's trademarked.

------
fabiandesimone
I used to own @ipad

For some reason after some time without me using it, I lost access to the
account (I don't think it was hacked, I think it was twitter that screwed me
over) and some random lady got it. Now it seems in someone elses hand.

I have no idea why it was taken away from me, but I must say to this day, I'm
still pissed.

~~~
toolz
From my perspective, that id was not being used by you, and someone who wanted
to use that name wanted it and apparently is using it. Twitter wants active
people to use their service and so they now have another active person using
their service because they took something that I guess legally belongs to them
(I have no idea what the legalities are here, just assuming) and gave it to
someone else to use that makes their service better.

I'd be pissed for a minute, but I'm curious if you feel you had some sort of
claim to that name? If I were in your position maybe I would feel differently.
I'm just curious to hear what exactly makes you angry.

------
drpgq
That wasn't what I was expecting but cool nonetheless. I remember @canada's
first tweet and wondered why it took so long.

------
niravshah
Twitter is pretty good at "releasing" accounts that are unused for a period of
time. A couple of users mention being "screwed over" or "hacked" when losing
accounts, but if you don't use a Twitter handle, you run the risk of losing it
if someone reaches out to Twitter about it.

~~~
corin_
It seems a bit random whether they do it... I'd quite like to get my first
name (@corin) which has one tweet, posted in July 2007, and no activity at all
since. I appreciate their policy of not allowing you to request they kill a
dormant account, but after 7.5 years you'd think it might have been released
by now

~~~
toyg
it might have been used for private messages all this time, or for oauth
logins.

~~~
corin_
Oauth logins possible didn't think of that, not direct messages though as
isn't following anyone. After 7+ years I strongly suspect it isn't used for
logins either, but could be wrong.

------
ForHackernews
> “All the content of Twitter.com belongs to Twitter’s owners,” Castaño
> explained in a tweet. “Who am I to sell little bits of the domain to
> anyone?”

Isn't that kind of the problem? Maybe we should be exploring protocols that
let _users_ own the content they create.

~~~
vertex-four
Interesting thing is, DNS is structured in much the same way technically. The
only difference is that the terms of service of the TLDs say that you own your
domain and can sell it... with a bunch of caveats around trademark violations
and the law allowing seizures.

------
codewithcheese
It would be fun if he gave the accounts to people doing amazing things in the
country rather than to the government. Not saying the respective governments
are doing a bad job, just that a country is more than a government.

~~~
jcdavis
@sweden does this - Its a different Swede every week. (I think a few other
countries do similar as well)

------
codexon
Is there a good solution to resolving name squatting for web apps?

It seems like the system is broken if someone has to do this.

~~~
zedadex
The current trend seems to be granting "official" or "verified" icons (youtube
does this IIRC). Though looking for those icons isn't as intuitive as seeing a
name that 'seems official' (i.e. a name that only a person who has claims to
it should/would be in control of).

------
boobsbr
So, another type of cyber squatter.

~~~
svincent
The good type.

