On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 11:45 AM, Nick Arnett <[email protected]> wrote: > > Question for the folks at Twitter - any stats on how often people > change their screen names? In another thread, we were talking about > the problem of resolving IDs to names... I'm refreshing my user data > for lots of users every few days, in large part to catch screen name > changes. I could start keeping track of the changes, but I have not > done so yet.
Excellent question, I was just wondering that myself. > Intuition suggests that users would rarely change their screen names, > especially if they are active. Do you have any data to support this? Anecdotally, I've seen a few-but-rare name changes in the people I follow on Twitter. > Come to think of it, an API call that would give us names changed > since a certain date would be very useful for avoiding the need to > check everybody. Even better, return friend or follower names changed > since a date. Seems like the former would be easier to provide than the latter. It'd be nice if Twitter.com would redirect names (i.e. if you go to http://twitter.com/foo it would tell you/direct you to http://twitter.com/bar) for awhile too, but that's another issue and possibly more hassle than it's worth. TjL
