The article doesn't mention one reason for creating inactive Twitter accounts -- to reserve a name someone else wants and wait to be bought out.<p>When I first created a Twitter account, I naturally enough wanted to use the handle "lutusp" that I use everywhere (here, there, everywhere). But someone who knew who I was had already created an account under that name, but one that has never been active -- not one tweet. The account holder is apparently waiting for me to offer to buy the right to use my own name (clearly someone who doesn't realize how cheap I am).<p>My other common handle, "plutus", is also taken, but by an actual entity with a Website -- only God knows why a company would name themselves "plutus", but I can't accuse them of being inactive, only masochistic.<p>Parenthetically, there is precisely one "Paul Lutus" in the world. Some see this as good thing :), but it means when I see some lame variation on my name like the above examples, I am immediately suspicious.<p>The Twitter name-reserving follies are a variation on the domain-squatter practice. I have a website "arachnoid.com" that is pretty well-known, so naturally enough people are squatting on arachnoid.org, arachnoid.biz, and arachnoid.net ("buy this domain!"), all the top-level domain (TLD) variations anyone can snap up without meeting special requirements.<p>All I can say is, when I registered my domain, I could easily have gotten control of the TLD variations, but I wasn't nearly cynical enough -- then (in 1996). As to Twitter, when I arrived it was already too late -- my name was reserved.
Twitter url availability is now the immediate thing I check when I'm considering a name or URL. I've even at times opted to not go with names/urls or stall projects over it.<p>For my main project, someone has the @name, no tweets for over a year, 0 followers/0 following, 6 tweets total... whereas I've had the .com since before they even created the account so I was sure I'd be able to claim it. If not by their impersonation policy then by their inactivity policy. Over a month later I got the boilerplate "No."<p>Either Twitter has some metrics we can't see to determine "activity" or they're just not even looking.