About 3 years ago a French software company approach me to buy the domain name balloon.com. Whenever I get a decent offer for the domain I google the name of the person making the offers followed by the word ‘balloon’ (offers usually come from a @gmail or @yahoo email address).
I did the above and discovered the guy making the offers was one of the founders of balloonup.com – a service that lets conference crowds engage with their event via their mobile phones. They had a twitter account and so I started to follow them, their twitter username was @balloon.
I had been frustrated with my own username as it just wasn’t ‘cool’. I tried to contact @balloons but the account was private and seemed to be owned by a kid in China? What I really wanted was @balloon and as they were making substantial offers for my .com domain name I knew it wasn’t up for grabs.
After a few months of following them on twitter I ‘unfollowed’ as all their tweets were in french and their content not relevant to my interests. Unfollowing them was a mistake – they changed their company name and ditched @balloon in the summer of 2012 and I had no idea the username became available.
So…. a few months back I went to https://twitter.com/balloon…. and shock – the account was suspended.
I contacted the previous owner on twitter and he replied:
@davidsaker @balloon hello. No we released it 6 months ago and was used by a jackass then, now suspended. Good luck trying get it! 😉 best
— Guillaume POTIER (@guillaumepotier) January 21, 2013
I assumed from this the suspended owner must have been using dodgy language, posting dodgy photos or following too many people too quick.
I did try keeping a browser page on https://twitter.com/balloon and refreshing it a few times every day…. but I couldn’t do that for 6 months.
I googled the problem of registering a suspended Twitter username, it turns out my only solution was to contact twitter support.
I followed the support instructions – it stated that I could only have a suspended name if I owned the registered trademark and supplied the trademark details. My heart sunk. I filled the form in anyway and in the special instructions I explained that I didn’t think it was possible to own a trademark for a generic word and as I owned the domains balloon.com & balloon.co.uk I could give it a great home. I pressed send but didn’t hold out much hope.
To my amazement 2 weeks later twitter support got back to me and gave me the option of registering @balloon as a new account or changing my current username. I opted for the second as I could keep all my history and followers.
I went back to https://twitter.com/balloon and began refreshing every few hours. 24 Hours later I hit the refresh and it was me…. I had it.