Have you noticed that while many people user their names for Twitter (a great idea in my opinion), some use much longer usernames, such as their first name and the name of their business.

For example, SandyAtMyBusinessName

What’s wrong with this?

While having your name and your business name is a great idea for remind people who you are, with Twitter, it’s too much.

Twitter allows us only 140 characters (including names, spaces, punctuation and letters).  This means if someone wants to respond to a “tweet” you’ve written, your username counts against the 140 characters and therefore further limits the amount they can write.

Let’s take my Twitter username: SandraMartini

Time for a little math…

This accounts for 13 characters, add in the @ sign and it becomes @SandraMartini, or 14 characters which leaves 124 for people to write.

If I had used SandyAtMyBusinessName, that would have been 21 characters (22 if we include the @), thus leaving only 118 for someone to write.

So what’s your username?

P.S. Mine’s still SandraMartini. 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Web 2.0, Social Networking, Computers/Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.