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How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

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Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#91

Post by lesterbuck »

bushido wrote: post #70
harryh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. But I'd feel less bad for that person than someone who drove their Mercedes every day and had it stolen. Also, a Mercedes and a twitter handle (or domain name) aren't exactly the same thing as a twitter handle is a unique owner of a particular pice of the namespace. A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use.

> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use. So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?

I have a friend with family in Venezuela. A few years ago, Chavez decided that underutilized land is suddenly free for the poor to squat on. Their family member had bought the land after saving a long time, and was now saving for the funds to build a house on the land. Now the land is gone.

The GP's analogy is extremely weak.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#92

Post by zaidf »

I have a four letter twitter handle(zaid) and I probably average a half dozen forgot-password requests daily...many of them people in the middle east with the same name as me trying to take over my account.

I've had two users offer to buy my username.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#93

Post by haswell »

harryh wrote: post #76
bushido wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use. So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?

I think you're deliberately not hearing what I'm saying. Here's a good analogy: Some rich guy buys an amazing house on a beautiful California beachfront. But then never even bothers to stay there because he's got 3 other vacation homes. It just sits there empty all year long. Would it be ok for someone to break in and start living there? No, of course not. But you do have to kind of dislike that guy right? If he does…

So a minute ago you're saying that a Mercedes can't really compare to a unique Internet handle but somehow owning 4 houses is comparable? I'm really not following your analogy.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#94

Post by simeonf »

georgemcbay wrote: post #4

Seems like Twitter could easily verify the story based on their own logs and then restore access to his N account. He doesn't mention pursuing that, though.

(I work at twitter but don't have anything to do with account security, etc)

I think something is in the works...

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#96

Post by hueving »

harryh wrote: post #76
bushido wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A better analogy would be an owner of a valuable piece of property who wasn't putting it to good use. So if you were not putting your backyard to good use you would not feel too bad if your neighbors decided to encroach on it?

I think you're deliberately not hearing what I'm saying. Here's a good analogy: Some rich guy buys an amazing house on a beautiful California beachfront. But then never even bothers to stay there because he's got 3 other vacation homes. It just sits there empty all year long. Would it be ok for someone to break in and start living there? No, of course not. But you do have to kind of dislike that guy right? If he does…

Twitter handles are free and multiple tweets are free.

There is no reason he should have to give up @H just because he isn't utilizing it enough. The person that got it better not send a single tweet shorter than the maximum to fit your logic.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#97

Post by Buge »

mrbill wrote: post #34

It's not a $50K Twitter username unless someone actually paid $50K for it at one point, is it? "Not accepting an offer of $50K for a twitter username I didn't use" doesn't really count...

It's worth what people are willing to pay for it. If people are willing to pay $50k then it is worth $50k. Of course it might have gone down in value since the offer.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#98

Post by lancewiggs »

Everyone looks bad here, but I want to focus on Twitter. For me this case is yet another demonstration that Twitter sees its customers as advertisers and places low priority on the community.

I pay Twitter nothing, and yet the service is valuable to me. So instead of continuously crippling the service in the name of goodness knows what, why not actually charge users for a premium experience. Things like customer service that works, a gold member status flag, controls on swapping account ownership, analytics and so on. Offer 3 paid levels - personal, business and corporate, and obviously keep the free level forever. Once revenue comes from customers, then perhaps it will help in understanding that while other revenue night be larger, the true value of Twitter is derived from the community.

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#99

Post by patio11 »

nthj wrote: post #37
harryh wrote: post #18

Who are people's current favorite domain registrars? I've been with name.com for the last year or so and have been happy, but I'm always curios to hear from others.

http://DNSimple.com for us. Their template system and support is fantastic.

I've heard good things about them from friends. This article was the last straw for me -- I just migrated my 90 domains off of GoDaddy. Actually, I didn't. I just told DNSimple to do all the work, via their (brilliant) concierge onboarding option: http://blog.dnsimple.com/2014/01/domain-transfer-concierge-s...

"Here's my credit card and GoDaddy creds, guys, and here's a technical note about my DNS settings that I want you to pay extra special attention to. Tell me when I should expect to start getting the GoDaddy confirmation emails. Other than that, have fun playing with DNS settings -- I never want to even think about them again."

This post is 5% "Here's my recommendation for a DNS service" and 95% "Notice how in return for an hour or two of grunt work a SaaS company just made it very easy for me to award them $2,000 of high-margin recurring revenue a year despite being twice as expensive as my pre-existing option by successfully overcoming my 'I would love to move off my existing solution but it requires grunt work so I think I'll punt on that decision for, oh, eight years' objection? That's a really good trade. You should consider offering it in your SaaS business, too, in any way that makes sense for it."

Re: How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

#100

Post by benatkin »

It's sad, but twitter's not transferring it back in a week's time gives me more confidence in twitter, not less. There isn't any evidence of the stealing of the domain names and the extortion available besides OP's copies of the email messages and information that GoDaddy won't provide. With the value twitter ID has, twitter shouldn't do anything without clear evidence.

He might have been able to get it back if it was his trademark or even name that he lost and not some witty username.

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