After Domain Squatting, Twitter Squatting

carusoj writes "Squatting on domain names is nothing new, but Twitter has created a new opportunity for squatters, in the form of Twitter IDs. Writes Richard Stiennon: 'Is there evidence of Twitter squatting (squitting?) Let's check. Yup, every single-letter TwitID is taken ... How about common words? Garage, wow, war, warcraft, Crisco, Coke, Pepsi, Nike, and Chevrolet are all taken. My guess is that Twitter squatters have grabbed all of these in the hopes that they will be worth selling in the not too distant future. Of course the legitimate holders of brands can sue for them and Twitter can just turn them over if asked. But, because the investment and risk for the squatter is zero, you are going to see the rapid evaporation of available Twitter IDs.'"

Re:Yep.

[pcolaman]

Sony didn't win. The lady just couldn't afford to continue the legal battle and gave in. Because justice in our civil court system (and sometimes in the criminal side as well) is bought rather than won.

Re:Combatting Multis?

[khellendros1984]

Scenario: College dorm running behind NAT. Many users, probably many Twitter account holders, but a single IP.

Re:Can't say I ever used Twitter

[Chaos Incarnate]

OpenID is great in theory, but has a couple of rather annoying implementation flaws—not the least of which is that there's no way to aggregate existing IDs from multiple providers into one "meta-OpenID".

There's also the problem of providers like LiveJournal not giving full access to outside OpenID users—for example, you can comment with an OpenID, but you can't have a journal associated with that OpenID. Because of this, you're required to have multiple IDs with multiple providers. So not only does the lack of aggregation befoul past accounts, but you have to keep using all of your accounts going forward, and not just one OpenID everywhere you go.