Putting ideas to the test
By nature I’m a tinkerer; I like to play around with new and different things. So when I have an idea the first thing that comes to mind is that I have to try it out. I recently came across an issue in which I tried to register for a Twitter handle, but it was already taking by someone. I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has experienced this problem. The issue in this situation is the this particular handle has become stale, meaning that the person has never sent a tweet and the account was created in 2010. This was the seed that generated the inspiration for my idea.
Twitter is just one location in which this could occur, there are plenty of other examples: domains, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. I started to search for online exchanges, in which individuals could procure or release handles from someone else. There are plenty of sites for domain exchanges, but I couldn’t find anything for other types of digital handles. So what is a tinkerer like myself going to do? … go out and build it myself.
Fade to stage left, in comes handleswap.com. I decided to start coding again and build a site in which people can identify what handles they either want to acquire (swapin) or release (swapout). The initial focus is on Twitter handles, because they have a decent API and I wanted to solve my immediate problem, which was to get the handle I’m looking for.
Currently it is against Twitter’s policies to buy or sell handles, so handleswap.com doesn’t deal with the actual exchanging of handles just yet. (Don’t tell anyone, but this is being worked on.) What you can do however, is to let people know the handles you want to swapin or swapout. The best part is that all you have to so is send a tweet.
To SwapOut a handle, just send a tweet and include “@handleswap #swapout”. This will let the system know that the owner of the tweet wants to release that particular handle.
To SwapIn a handle(s), send a tweet and include @handleswap #swapin as well as include the twitter handles you would like to acquire, eg: “@handleswap #swapin @handleyouwant, @secondhandle”.
If you feel that this idea is worth pursuing, please let me know by sending a tweet to swapin or swapout a Twitter handle.
