Finding out that your own name, the one you diligently snapped up on gmail, bought the domain for years ago, even wrangled accounts across the board in all the places you thought you might need, was available when you selected a twitter handle, is REALLY annoying.
After using the ‘whois username‘ function today while looking for a few project accounts, I discovered that @danmcewan was available several months after I picked up @al_waqt. Bad call on the self-branding there. Granted, I have and was using the al-waqt.com domain at the time, but looking back, I had the foresight of a teeny-bopper who went with cats_are_totally_cute@hotmail.com in middle school. Is is worth the $500 pricetag to try to service mark my own name (and likely fail because, let’s be honest, I’m probably the guy squatting my own name for this guy who might *actually* be [in]famous), just to try to get Twitter to hand me the unused @danmcewan account on the grounds of Trademark Infringement? Yeah, probably not.
Eventually, user names on popular services are going to start looking like current day passwords if more of them don’t start automating username timeouts for inactive accounts. Who would currently go through the effort and process provided by Twitter to remove accounts for the deceased? Post mortem cleanup is going to be a thriving business at some point.