But then, here’s the extended version:

Last week, Bengaluru’s popular techblog controlenter had a post on requesting for twitter usernames that were inactive.  Link to post here.  So, as the process goes, You send a mail to username [at] twitter [dot] com with the following data:

1. The twitter username you want
2. Your current twitter username
3. Whether you want to use the username (if allocated to you) with the current account or you want to use it as a new / separate account.

I dug around twitter and noticed that the username @ashwin was unused until that moment with just 2 tweets and about 3 follows and 1 follower.  Typically – UNUSED as per twitter’s terms.  And off went an email to twitter requesting that they give me the twitter username @ashwin.

And five days later, today, when twitter stopped logging in with my username @cruisemaniac, I thought I’d been “phished“.  But then, surprise! surprise! My username had changed.  Twitter had actually allocated @ashwin for me. Thanks guys for that!!!

To be the only @ashwin on twitter is awesome… and so with this tweet, I changed my twitter handle on twitter:

My Tweet indicating change of twitter handles

I did receive a lot of mixed reactions… @the100rabh paid homage to @cruisemaniac! @dkris and @pcsbox felt that the change was good… Some more tweets happened that are on twitter search.

And there ends this happy story

But yeah, the post is not over… The technical part of the twitter-username-change still remains:  If and when you are allocated your new username by twitter, the old one is lost.  If you want, you can register again using a different e-mail ID and hold your old username till someone else feels that you’re squatting on the username and requests twitter to release it for him / her.

I do have @cruisemaniac booked and held tight… Fingers crossed!

For all that followed the @cruisemaniac and felt that the tweets were worth listening to, @ashwin will still rock the show and rule the roost! B-)  And for those who dont know me yet, I’m @ashwin on twitter.

-Chao…