A shoeshine guy who guards some of Twitter’s most desirable geographic handles | Hacker News Reader

A shoeshine guy who guards some of Twitter’s most desirable geographic handles

washingtonpost.com

97 pointsantr29 comments

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.

On one hand it sucks you lost the accounts, on the other hand I'm glad to see the equivalent of domain squatting is at least somewhat solvable on twitter.

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).

Doesn't cost much to register a trademark.

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.

I don't think the name has a trademark because it's 2 generic words added together.

_k, did you try to raise an issue? Did you ask Twitter what happened?

Also, this is why Telegram's policy towards "desired username"[1] worries me:

  If your desired username is already taken, we will be happy to help you acquire it, provided that you have that same username on at least two of these services: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

No, you don't do that! If someone has taken "tom" and that also happens to be the ID of Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise - everywhere else, they should have come first, or you should have reserved all those famous uesernames hoping these celebrities will come to your service.

[1] https://telegram.org/faq#q-what-do-i-do-if-my-username-is-ta...

I may have tweeted what happened but I didn't raise an issue in an official way.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

For OAuth purposes, surely the profile can be renamed.

What's the best way to go about getting them released to you?

Step 1) Be important and influential Step 2) Don't be unimportant and uninfluential

They used to be good about it. Now there are lot of old, inactive accounts that aren't removed.

I don't buy that story. I have had a Twitter account for years and it probably has fewer than 10 tweets, plus I go months at a time without logging in. But '@anigbrowl' is unique and meaningless enough that nobody else is likely to attempt to register it. I'm not at all worried about it being deactivated, whereas if I had '@databases' I would ensure it was hooked up to some software equivalent of a hamster wheel that would generate a steady stream of activity.

> “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.

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.

I'd hasten to note that his statements aren't a legal opinion or site license.

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.

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

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.

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).

So, another type of cyber squatter.

The good type.

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