My Secret To Grabbing Dormant Twitter names (like @Ewan)
Just been name-checked by The Next Web (Hi Zee and the rest of the gang!) in their article detailing the oncoming Twitter Goldrush as they release inactive usernames to be registered.
You see, Twitter are sitting on a lot of inactive names, and people want to grab the ones that are useful to them… especially if they’ve had one update to them, no followers, and been sitting there doing nothing for three years. There’s no official way to do this (yet) but as I’ve detailed before, you can mange it, as The Next Web has now reminded everyone:
Besides that the only way to get Twitter to give you a username is if you know the right people. Journalist and podcaster Ewan Spence managed to switch from @EwanSpence to @Ewan by, as he wittily put it, “hanging around the internet till I used the irl.api and bumped into the right person at Las Vegas”.
Just to let you know that the exact workings of the irl.api, the right person, and the process I used was deliberately obfuscated as I knew that letting out too many details would have swamped someone that helped me out.
It’s great that Twitter is opening this out, I just hope they have a good arbitration process beyond timestamp, otherwise it’s going to get very messy. But there are always… opportunities.
Hi Ewan, thanks for the post! It was your experience that inspired the post actually. I was thinking about how you went to @Ewan and how I could go to @martin. However, when I looked up the tragic circumstances around why that account’s abandoned I decided to stop. Would be a bit sick to try to take it, perhaps. As it is, I’ll see how this landgrab turns out and stick with @martinsfp for now.
Martin, agreed on the circumstances, but here’s a thought. Will twitter’s process lock @martin forever, or will it be land grabbed and used by someone with less respect than yourself? I hope Twitter are ready to cope with a lot of similar stories.