A couple of Saturdays ago (well, maybe four or five now), I got it into my head to change my Twitter username. Or an idea that had been percolating for a few months about wanting to own my whole name on the service finally coalesced. Or something. In any case, I impulsively changed the name on my account to ernestoburden. Twitter automatically updated my username for all the people following me. So far so good. But about an hour later I got an email notification that someone had commented on my Facebook status. The commenter was wondering if the link in my status update was spam or a hoax, or worse. But I hadn’t posted a status update with a link in it that morning… I checked and saw that the status update was from some sort of service trying to broker my old Twitter name. Within an hour they’d hopped on it, squatted and were now trying to sell it. Worse, updates they posted to it were making their way onto my Facebook page via the Twitter Facebook app. I killed the app and went around the Web updating every social service that I’d associated with my old Twitter account, as well as my blog where I had a hard link to my Twitter account and a widget. This was all especially important to me since in the meantime, Twitter had caught on to the username brokering the squatters were attempting and killed the old username for a couple of different violations of Twitter’s terms of service, leaving a page saying the account had been suspended for suspicious activity. Not something anyone would want a link on any one of my social profiles pointing to!
Thanks! I was recently considering changing my twitter name @wowlibrarian. After reading this, I remembered my very sour experience when I changed the name of my blog some time ago. Same thing happened, and my old blog name became associated with very unsavory activities. Great cautionary tale!
I changed my username once the hard thing I faced is telling people that I’ve changed it, than change all the links on my website