

Twitter, its time to fix inactive accounts - twog
http://tonigemayel.com/blog/uncategorized/twitter-its-time-to-fix-inactive-accounts

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lutusp
The article doesn't mention one reason for creating inactive Twitter accounts
-- to reserve a name someone else wants and wait to be bought out.

When I first created a Twitter account, I naturally enough wanted to use the
handle "lutusp" that I use everywhere (here, there, everywhere). But someone
who knew who I was had already created an account under that name, but one
that has never been active -- not one tweet. The account holder is apparently
waiting for me to offer to buy the right to use my own name (clearly someone
who doesn't realize how cheap I am).

My other common handle, "plutus", is also taken, but by an actual entity with
a Website -- only God knows why a company would name themselves "plutus", but
I can't accuse them of being inactive, only masochistic.

Parenthetically, there is precisely one "Paul Lutus" in the world. Some see
this as good thing :), but it means when I see some lame variation on my name
like the above examples, I am immediately suspicious.

The Twitter name-reserving follies are a variation on the domain-squatter
practice. I have a website "arachnoid.com" that is pretty well-known, so
naturally enough people are squatting on arachnoid.org, arachnoid.biz, and
arachnoid.net ("buy this domain!"), all the top-level domain (TLD) variations
anyone can snap up without meeting special requirements.

All I can say is, when I registered my domain, I could easily have gotten
control of the TLD variations, but I wasn't nearly cynical enough -- then (in
1996). As to Twitter, when I arrived it was already too late -- my name was
reserved.

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flexxaeon
Twitter url availability is now the immediate thing I check when I'm
considering a name or URL. I've even at times opted to not go with names/urls
or stall projects over it.

For my main project, someone has the @name, no tweets for over a year, 0
followers/0 following, 6 tweets total... whereas I've had the .com since
before they even created the account so I was sure I'd be able to claim it. If
not by their impersonation policy then by their inactivity policy. Over a
month later I got the boilerplate "No."

Either Twitter has some metrics we can't see to determine "activity" or
they're just not even looking.

