How I got the twitter username I always wanted
I began working on my pet project, then dubbed PEC News in 2007. Way back then, the student interns developing the Web site had never heard of RSS feeds and didn’t know about free blogging software. No one was talking about the micro-blogging platform, twitter.
The name of my pet project evolved to County News and I began scooping up usernames for various platforms in case of future use. It worked on UStream, worked on YouTube, on Scribd… but not on twitter.
When I finally realized the news potential of twitter, it was late 2008 and to my horror, the @countynews username was taken.
Since then, I have tried with the help of three separate assistants to nab the username from its inactive holder, someone in Michigan who hadn’t posted a tweet since July 2009. Nothing worked.
I now see that our main challenge was twitter’s policy; like everything else social media, it’s constantly evolving. So once we had a line on how to obtain the username, the line had already become a dead end.
Dear people seeking inactive usernames on twitter, here is how I did it this week.
I wrote a brief email to Twitter Support <support@twitter.zendesk.com> stating my case on Wednesday morning. I soon received an auto-response asking me to be patient.
On Thursday afternoon, a response arrived in my inbox with the golden words:
The reported account has been removed due to inactivity and the username is now available for use.
I was directed to try signing up just like anyone else to nab the name.
My attempts failed because of something twitter needed to fix, so I wrote to tell them and they responded on Friday with:
Hello, Thanks for the follow up. Please try again.
I did and it worked.
Twitter’s current policy on inactive accounts is linked here.
Many thanks to Andr8a at twitter.
Check out my County News feed on twitter or at http://countynews.ca.
Good luck and happy tweeting!
