scrooks's dashboard

I don't think it has to be too smart. Smart is nice, don't get me wrong, but even if it's simply a count of messages that have been displayed since I last opened the app, with opening the app resetting things to 0, that would be fine. And much better than nothing.

I believe that's how Prowl works, for example.

Well, now. That's not exactly what I said, is it? I believe I said this:

"I wouldn't say they changed the rules. Someone there took pity on me and grandfathered me in under the old rules because I asked before they took place. Jeeze, you guys sure can be exceptionally critical about a service for which you pay exactly nothing. There are real people behind this free service, not autonomous robots following a rule set."

Meaning someone decided to be kind to me and grandfather me in. Kindness is a very human quality.

I think what you're really upset about is that "the kid who owns the ball gets to make the rules". :-) But you can always choose not to play with that kid.... – scrooks, on April 21, 2009 15:06

I think you are putting your own desires here over what is the real reality. The younger the user is, the less chance they give a hoot about their user name. Watch someone less than 18 (25?) set up a new account on a web service, and you'll see that their _first_ attempt will be something wacky with numbers in it. They don't care about getting twitter.com/johndoe, they'd rather have twitter.com/snckwit778. And they're certainly not going to think it's an inferior service because of it. As Thomas commented, see AOL. It's thriving and there certainly aren't any "good" names left there.

There's no way to offer everyone a user name that is a direct reflection on their real name, or even some other desired name. That's just the way it is when you have millions of users. The people who have been using the Internet all their young life don't even think about it, they just naturally deal with it. We older people need to learn to adapt. If you're not fast enough with a service to snag the name you really want, move on and snag some other name and get over it.

People will not move away from a social service like twitter just because they couldn't get the handle they wanted. Very few care about such things. People will only move away when there's another service that is an order of magnitude better and has been around long enough to get social momentum going.

Gmail grew quickly because it offered what seemed like unlimited storage at the time when Hotmail and Yahoo had relatively very small limits. That and the fact that Google itself was (and is) a hot property.

[Note that the issue of _abandoned_ names on Twitter being released for reuse is a totally different topic and I'm not commenting on that.] – scrooks, on April 21, 2009 14:57

Starting last night my incoming alerts from Yahoo are now broken into 2 or 3 parts. I also have my email setup with a tool that sends 160 char (or less) alerts to my phone. These now sometimes show up in multiple parts. Looks like it's not just a twitter thing.

Also, it's not consistent. I just got another Yahoo alert and it's one piece even though it's long. Or maybe someone just fixed everything. :-)

That's a juvenile straw man. I don't have a choice in my government (unless I leave for some other country), so of course we should speak up about it. We _are_ the government and the government is us, if you will. Twitter is provided as a free service, take it or leave it. Make suggestions, offer constructive criticism, but don't get your panties in a wad if they don't do something you want. Just go away if it bothers you that much. I'm done here, this conversation has gotten past the point where it really has a point. Have fun with the last word. – scrooks, on January 24, 2009 21:46

I wouldn't say they changed the rules. Someone there took pity on me and grandfathered me in under the old rules because I asked before they took place. Jeeze, you guys sure can be exceptionally critical about a service for which you pay exactly nothing. There are real people behind this free service, not autonomous robots following a rule set. – scrooks, on January 24, 2009 21:40

A very nice person at twitter helped me out and switched my ID, but only because I had originally written in to ask so long ago. If you're asking now, don't get your hopes up. You rock, @delbius!!! – scrooks, on January 23, 2009 22:05

First I opened a help ticket in the old help system to get an inactive username. That sat with no response for over a month until twitter went to the new help system and the ticket disappeared.

I used the new help process to open a new ticket and got this response after about a week:

"Due to high ticket volume, Twitter Support is no longer releasing inactive user names unless in cases of trademark or copyright violation. We are working on releasing all inactive user names in the future, however, we will no longer manually release them on an individual basis."

Then I found this site and sent an email to the address that Crystal gave above and got this response:

"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."

This is all very unfortunate. I am well known many other places by the username "scrooks" which sits completely unused at twitter for more than a year, but now I can't claim it and am using the name "drthunder" instead. I guess I waited too long to make the request. I'm extremely bummed by this.

This is _so_ needed. I didn't even realize how this worked until recently. I initially changed my reply settings to see all replies, and I picked up a lot of interesting people to follow that way. On the other hand, it makes it totally unusable to follow many of the more popular people. I really, really would like this to be a per-user setting.