

250,000 English words currently available as Twitter handles - red_hare
http://peticol.as/twitter-handles/english-words.txt

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rexf
I was about to sort them by letter count, but there's a txt of 4 letter
handles: <http://peticol.as/twitter-handles/4-letter-ok-sounding.txt>

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furyofantares
nill was the best one I saw, looks like someone got to it.

~~~
red_hare
The script generates some false positives on reserved words. It's a bug I need
to fix.

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marshray
Output at <http://pastebin.com/18vCegaT>

grep -P '(phobe|phile|ist)\s*$'

@categorist or @pantywaist, anyone?

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8ig8
Hard to believe @abdominohysterectomy is still available. Jackpot.

Edit: Equally fortunate: abdominohysterectomy.com is available.

<http://www.whois.com/whois/abdominohysterectomy.com>

Jokes asides, it would be useful to cross check this with domain availability
and username availability on other _popular_ social sites.

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fakeer
Dictionary word domain names are mostly gone, esp. if you are referring to
.COMs.

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hardik988
This is OT: I've always wanted to take a crack at a couple of problems/semi-
thought-experiments I came up with:

1) Find the verified Twitter account followed by minimum number of users -
This is easy, since Twitter maintains an official list of verified accounts at
<https://twitter.com/verified/following> . We could iterate over this list,
and find the minimum.

2) Find the maximum-followed non-verified Twitter account. Now this is a
harder problem. Does anyone have any ideas apart from brute-forcing Twitter
handles?

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marshray
2) I think you'd be likely to find it by just crawling the graph, but it'd be
very hard to _prove_ that you had found it. For example, @sockington
<https://twitter.com/sockington> has 1.4M followers.

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planetjones
At least @arsefeet is available - don't all rush to get it at once

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joshontheweb
I hope people don't use this to park twitter usernames.

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adventured
Don't worry, only 90% of the prior million good names are parked. I'm sure
it'll never happen. ;)

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brianwillis
...and yet every permutation of "Brian Willis" is taken. Many of which are
spam accounts which twitter seems completely uninterested in killing off.

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jurassic
I share your frustration. No reasonable permutation of my name and initials or
usual handles is available, and most are inactive accounts.

Besides their developer-relations problem, namespace pollution and stagnation
is a big problem for Twitter going forward. Who wants to join and use a
service when the closest thing they can get to their desired username is a
second-class moniker like @ffffirst_last1 or @L4stF1rst88 ?? I've heard this
complaint from several of my friends who were late to the Twitter scene. The
name availability issue is the main reason I think app.net has any chance of
succeeding.

~~~
alaskamiller
Kind of like what wants a screen name like AzNpRyDe1983 or XXXlilCutiEXXX3 or
FastIntegra345?

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philip1209
Some may be reserved keywords - e.g. accounts is available,
twitter.com/accounts returns a 404, but you are unable to register the
username.

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martinoma
You might want to filter out words which are too long to actually be Twitter
handles.

~~~
red_hare
More importantly, thats something I should have thought to do before running
this script for 8 hours. Would have eliminated about an hour of requests :)

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justin_
I made a python script for this purpose a while back. Supports brute force and
dictionaries.

<https://github.com/process/Twitter-Name-Finder>

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joshu
top 50, sorted by frequency

all me leave events resources myself post status pages accounts positions
discuss administrative remove root join session statistics phone friendship
blocks focused links responsibilities administered explore suspended sessions
receptors discusses characterization practised translate ensuring frontiers
stationed industrialization telecommunications distinguishes occurrences
condensed resembled rapidity legislatures misunderstanding gastrointestinal
administering discharges ensued characterizes

~~~
mintplant
As someone who rather wanted @root, I can say that these are not all
available.

~~~
joshu
Yep. I just sorted his list by something more reasonable than alpha.

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cupcake-unicorn
One short-ish reasonable sounding one I was surprised wasn't taken was
"kobold"...you'd think that some tabletop gaming fan somewhere would have
gotten that one!

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drucken
This is why I like Perl,

    
    
      perl -e 'print sort{length $a <=> length $b} <>' english-words.txt > sorted.txt

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emillon
Thanks ! Just, you're missing a "print" and single quotes would work better :)

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drucken
Cheers for that! Fixed.

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t0
Thanks. I'm getting _tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes_.

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sp332
By the time you type "@tetramethoxypropenylbenzenes" you have only 111
characters left!

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red_hare
The real experiment is to run the script again and find out how many people
are parking the good ones now that i've distributed this list

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atoponce
No need to create a list quite that long, seeing as though Twitter doesn't
allow handles longer than 15 characters in length.

~~~
red_hare
Yeah. I realized that after this script ran for 8 hours :)

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taproot
Could have mentioned link includes them all... Dat mobile loading.

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Jaygitau
Awesome, got a good one

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richardjordan
cool - just snagged one

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iamdownloader
no 3-letter handlers?

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nwh
I tested that a while back in 2012.

There's some, but they're all nonsense. Nasty ones like 2q4 for the most part.

~~~
yefim323
not even @2q4 anymore...

