Twitter Parking
Remember domain name parking? - when someone registers a useful domain, sits on it but frustratingly isn’t even using it. Or when someone registers a domain that they think someone else will find useful in the hope of selling it to the highest bidder or making money from affiliate links. It’s annoying, but it’s become quite a norm, making it almost impossible to register a domain name using normal english dictionary words. Domain names are valuable. One of the first things I did in my recent week of paternity leave was to register my son’s domain name. He’ll thank me for it one day!
Now there is a new phenomenon, Twitter Parking. I need a Twitter account for a few charity projects that I’m involved with this year. I resolved to lookup the names and register them as soon as possible and finally got around to it this morning. I wasn’t surprised however to find that all of them were taken… parked! Most had no activity updates at all and none were in regular use. The example below was even totally upfront about holding their username.
And unlike domains you don’t even need to get the credit card out to park your username. All you need is the ability to setup a new email address for it. It looks like Twitter is more than aware of this of course and it looks like they have quite a progressive attitude towards the issue (although not without controversy). It is possible to claim inactive usernames as your own if the account has remained inactive for nine months and I’m sure we’ve seen some cases of celebs claiming fake accounts back as their own though I haven’t got any specific examples as I type this (please link up in the comments if you have).
So what are the lessons here? Twitter is crossing over to the mainstream. Your username is valuable. If you have a band, artist name, company, brand, meetup, idea, team, nickname… make sure you register the Twitter username. Before somebody else does!
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Unfortunately, this information is now out of date. Here is the answer I got from Twitter when I requested release of a Twitter username that has never been used but is identical to a website domain I hope to promote:
“Due to high ticket volume, Twitter Support is unable to change usernames in cases of inactive accounts. Unless your user name issue involves Terms of Service violations, you’ll have to wait until all inactive user names are released. We’re working on a better long term solution for this.”
It’s like everything else on Twitter; they grew too fast and didn’t prepare for the consequences of growth.
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Hi, I couldn’t find a contact form and it’s really important that I reach you so I hope you don’t mind me posting here. WOW, what an interesting little blog you have here :)! I also run one similar to Dave Haynes » Twitter Parking, I guess great haha. I’ve been following your site for a while now and I’ve got some bad news - you’re wasting your time if you’re only making a couple hundred bucks or even a few thousand a month. You can be doing SO much more. There are a lot of tips and tricks that will help you improve your google and yahoo ranking, just some stuff I’ve learned over the ages. It’s easy! It shouldn’t take you more than 5-10 minutes. Please reach me today at BigBloggerJake [at] gmail.com. I’ll check my spam folder and you should too, I know email filters are crazy these days. Looking forward to boucing ideas with you!