Check out this email from Twitter:

We’ve received a request regarding the release of a trademarked username. It has come to our attention that your Twitter account http://twitter.com/timbaland is in violation of our basic Terms of service, specifically article 4 which mentions impersonation:

1. You must not abuse, harass, threaten, impersonate or intimidate other Twitter users.

In this case “impersonation” is the issue. Impersonation is against our terms unless it’s parody. The standard for defining parody is, “Would a reasonable person be aware that it’s a joke. To settle this issue we have changed the username to timbaland1 to eliminate confusion. You can change your user name:

1. Visit Twitter.com/settings
2. Edit the Full Name and Username fields
3. Click “Save”

Sorry about that! If you’d like a t-shirt, send us your address and size and we’ll send one right out.

The upside is that I get a T-shirt out of it. However, it was an account I created for parody–the entries were something like “OMG I’m ripping off Scott Storch’s beatz yo!!!!”

Update: This was in their latest press email:

Sure, Timbaland and his MTV pals Twitter by txt but you don’t have to be a rock star to send and receive Twitter updates on the fly.

Twitter sold me out for an MTV partnership.  Well, I’d do it too.

One Response to “Twitter Stole My Username!”

1. uGuX SEO Blog says:

   December 17, 2007 at 2:37 pm

   Did you actually send in for the T-shirt?

   Reply