As we revealed recently, Twitter has plans to release all the old, neglected usernames that have long been abandoned by their original users.
Twitter counts a username as ‘lapsed’ if it hasn’t been logged into or tweeted from in six months.
While no timescale has been announced by Twitter for freeing up these accounts, we thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the lapsed usernames that we think will be most in demand once they get opened up.
While we don’t know how often the accounts below have been logged into, we do know that they haven’t been tweeted from recently and certainly seem abandoned….
1. Single-letter usernames
Not many online services let you have single letter usernames. Twitter does and for the most part they’re taken. The three you might want to hold out for are:
@s (@s used to belong to I Want Sandy, a “personal email assistant” service that closed down when the engineer behind it took a job (ironically) with Twitter.
See also: @i – interestingly, @q supposedly doesn’t exist. However you can’t register it, indicating that Twitter may have reserved it for its own uses.
2. Personal names:
A big draw will be first names. Here are some free ones that we found…
@Louise, @Penny, @Mohammed, @Abdul, @jayne
3. Alphabetically first
Look through a phone directory and you’ll see that virtually every service industry has companies wanting to get to the top of the list by gaming the alphabet. Name your business ‘A1 Window Cleaners’ and you’ll probably be spotted long before ‘The Super-duper Window Cleaning Company’ because you’ll be at the top of the alphabetical list.
While that doesn’t really help on Twitter, those who already have such business names will be keen to grab:
@a1, @aardvark
4. Cool Words:
Sometimes you just want a cool word for your Twitter username. These people grabbed a great name and then abandoned it. If Twitter freed them up, you could have:
@love (until the middle of last year this account was heavily used to promote romance novels and romantic comedies. Now it’s been abandoned.
@sax (Mysteriously, the sole tweet on this account is simply the word “daytrader”)
See also: @xray, @power, @magic, @cool, @wow, @lover, @pogostick, @prawn
5. Abandoned Ideas:
Sometimes a name is just sitting awaiting a good idea to go with it. That’s the case here…
@Why – this username is taken by someone who clearly thought there was a great business to go with it. They just never quite worked out what it was. Witness tweets like “Pondering a clever service to make use of this account” and “Keep the account alive” – something they’ve forgotten to do now, the sixth month deadline has passed.
6. Potential Services:
Besides, how about ideas that aren’t weren’t intended as services but really could be?
@Booze – We can see this being used in a couple of ways. It could give advice on quitting alcohol… or more likely be used by someone selling it. Maybe to accompany booze.com, a site currently serving no useful purpose?
7. Childish:
Can’t think of a username? Why not grab the first childish name that comes to mind? We found…
@Poo Yes, we started low, @Shit Yes, we went lower. If you fancy some innuendo, how about @ivorbiggun?
There’s also @Pooh (although admittedly this could be used by Disney for tweets from Winnie the Pooh too. We imagine his tweets would be along the lines of: “I want honey”, “Hello @ChristopherRobbin, want to throw sticks in the river?” and “Seriously Tigger, stop bouncing – it’s really getting annoying now.”
8. Porn
Believe it or not, @Porn has been allowed to lapse. Until June 2009 it tweeted about “Twitter porn personalities of the day”.
9. Brands might want these
Twitter will happily transfer existing Twitter usernames to trademark holders (for example, @BBC was passed to the BBC after a bit of trouble last year), However, we’re surprised that Nike hasn’t grabbed @JustDoIt or Coke hasn’t got a hold of @CokeIsIt yet.
Do you have your eye on a lapsed Twitter username you’d like to poach? Leave a comment and let us know…
I'm community manager on the national NHS website (http://www.nhs.uk) and we've had our eye on @nhs for a while as it hadn't been updated since 2007. I checked one day and it was still in use, and fortunately checked the next to find it available! :D We don't want to rename our main account (@nhschoices) just yet, but it could come in really useful quite soon.
Seems like you've put in some good hardwork for research here, Martin. Great post!
I'm quite lucky that I have my first name as my twitter username. This is a good opportunity for those who don't :)
Been trying to get “TheGeek” for ages. Seems I'm just too slow to register these sort of things.
where is @important ?
@porkfriedrice – Or @impotent :-)
The case is that many of the above account holders are probably reading TNW too, so they will just log in once and keep the accounts, I do not expect a lot of accounts to be released.
I’ve always has some crazy ideas and there was no network to allow them. Now when it is possible on Twitter I forgot what it was. Well, I guess I still have many possibilities.
Hey guys does anyone know…?
I wanted to change the user name I’d picked for my company (DinosaurCreativ)
I set up a new account with a new name Dinosaur_co_uk and now I want to swap the details over, without having to start again from scratch, or delete the old account. Both are registered to me – one at my work email and one at a home email address.
[All user names with Dinosaur were getting snapped up and I wanted to make sure I 'bagsied' it]
Does anyone know if this is possible at all to give yourself permission to do this?
Any advice would be much appreciated
Hi Caroline, all I can suggest is first, change one of the names to something slightly different, thus freeing up the original name. Then swap the other account over to that (now free name). Finally, rename the other account to the other name you want. Obviously this is dangerous and I can’t guarantee it will work, but in theory it should….
I’ve just started uploading covers of songs I like on YouTube and my YouTube name is ‘MissJessicaJohnston’ so I would love to have my Twitter name as ‘jessicajohnston’. The problem is that there is already someone who has that name that hasn’t Tweeted since October 30th 2008! She doesn’t even follow anyone! I Tweeted to her today to ask if she’s ever planning on Tweeting again because I would love her username but I doubt she’ll reply. She’s probably forgotten she even HAS Twitter! >:(