New Twitter handle
An explanation on why I have changed my Twitter handle from mattwittering to mjwittering
Author: Matthew Wittering | Published: 19th February 2010
So anyway I have been having problems with Twitter. For as long as I can remember I have been unable to update my profile information and the background on my profile. I finally pulled my finger out earlier this week and opened a support ticket to see if I could resolve these issues. Being technically minded and familiar with the idea of regular expressions in programming I surmised that I was not able to commit these changes because of my username.
The validation on the username field prevents users from opening accounts containing the word Twitter. When I opened my account my account on Twitter originally I wanted to have @matthewwittering as my handle. I felt that it fitted into the brand I was constucting for myself online. As my site is matthewwittering.co.uk, it seemed logical to have this conformity. Unfortunately matthewwittering does not fit into the defined length for Twitter usernames, so I selected mattwittering which now due to changes in the system does not pass the validation rules as a substring of this user name is, 'twitter'.
I received the following message from Charles on the support team.
Charles, Feb 18 11:04 am (PST):
Hi Matthew,
I'm sorry that you've been experiencing this problem. That's certainly a unique situation. Sadly, the rule which is preventing you from modifying your account settings is a system-wide limit which cannot be modified. Unless you remove the 'twitter' string from your username, there is no way to modify your account.
Please let us know if you encounter any further issues and again, I apologize for the inconvenience!
Sincerely,
@Charles
Twitter Support
I found myself in a really dilemma. What should I do? How should I rebrand myself and does it really matter? Well I think that is a real issue. But I think I have a solution. As my name is Matthew James Wittering, so I have decided to change my Twitter username to @mjwittering. Its not ideal. However I do not think that cause any issue.
Since changing my username everything works fine. I am disappointed that I had to change my username to resolve the issue. But I would prefer to have a full functioning Twitter account rather than the imperfect Twitter handle.
This work is licenced under a Creative Commons Licence
I am a graduate of Lougborough University where I read Computing and Management BSc (Hons) earning a 2:1 classification.