Oh it definitely doesn't make your username 'up for grabs'. What happened to you totally sucks and I hope you manage to get your account back.

That being said if you're not actually going to use your account you might want to at least consider giving it to someone who would put it to more active use. Just a thought.

I've been actively using the account for other purpose than tweeting, and had a vague plan to start using it for tweeting again. Should I have mentioned the plan publicly so that the attacker would have refrained from blackmailing me? I don't think so.

Someone offered him 50 grand for it, and he turned them down. I would be surprised if he hadn't considered it at that point, if not previously.

This COULD make sense. Are all other names taken up on twitter? Is it difficult to tweet without using the @N name? I never used twitter before.

Maybe google.com should have built their web site on kljasdklfjnaksdfn.com instead. That would have worked out just as well for them right? I haven't used the web very much.

While sympathetic - I'm also slightly amused at your twisted view about twitter name/account "ownership"…

Just how much of the "real world" law you're alluding to by using the term "ownership" do you suppose applies to Twitter handles? (or Gmail addresses, or Facebook pages, or even domain names?)

I don't think the user 'owns' it at all. I mean, it's pretty obvious that you're just laying claim to some set of bits in somebody else's system. I'm not confused about that :)

I just don't quite see how a username is 'owed' to other people who would use it more, either.

The twitter namespace is property of Twitter alone. It's cute that there are those who think the "owners" of these names would be each user.

Well, OK, but a certain level of assured "ownership" is beneficial to everybody. Twitter handles, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers, etc., would not be very useful if Twitter, ISP, postal service, telcos, etc. frequently exercised the right to deny access to previous users at any time.

Seeing how easily GoDaddy handed over the domain, it seems one can't even own a domain properly, and that is supposed to be a lot closer to an "ownership" right than Twitter handles.

I really don't understand why people still use goDaddy. i wouldn't recommend it to my arch-ennemy

The difference between some of those and twitter's namespace is that Twitter is not a public utility. It is a privately operated company with a defacto monopoly on short status updates (micro blogging).

We could look towards email and dns, though, as examples of a more fair distribution of namespace resources.

Organizations would do well to investigate what their options are to retain control over their namespace, lest it fall whim to a mishap such as this instance.

while it clearly doesn't, I wonder though if someone is using twitter so infrequently they would even care what their handle is. It's not like it has any intrinsic value or meaning. Why not just pick a random guid and use that as a handle (like I did) since I don't care one hoot what the handle is as I use twitter for exactly two things. Machine Learning datasets, and following a dozen or so people. I can do that from a guid as effectively as if I had @2600