Sol Young

So I got to thinking the other day about all the peeps on Twitter who have slick, short, names. Most I follow on Twitter follow this convention (ev, al3x, jack, biz, dick, iofy, to name a few). It’s not just a status symbol on the service, but also a matter of resource utilization.

I switched from solyoung to sol. Easier to remember and less to type (special thanks to the Twitter guys for help with that.)

Each message on Twitter is limited to 140 characters. As of yet there isn’t a Twitter application which handles the @user feature. Thus, a response to a longer name both costs time and characters. Another Twitterer I follow (you should too, he’ll change your life) is braverydanger. That’s thirteen characters (or fifteen including the @ and a space.) A response to jack or iofy with the @user feature costs six total characters, allowing 6.7% more room for a response.

This becomes even more important on a mobile phone when typing the extra characters could cost an additional twenty or more seconds (assuming a typical numeric keypad w/out T9 input.)

The switch meant losing all my previous followers (name changes are bad news for brand recognition.) It also meant getting my tweets over to the new account. Both are worth it since I’m young in the game of blogging.

(note: Twitter’s API saved the day. To copy the tweets from the old account to the new account I screen-scraped the old posts and wrote a shell script that imported the scraped posts in reverse order with do/curl/while. Fifteen minutes of coding.)

Now… If only the guys at sol.com would let me pick up that domain for less than the quarter million they quoted last time ;)