Pretty much. I've seen this with Angelina Jolie and pg (how's that for company, Paul?), but not with any of us mere mortals.
I also have an account that has never been active that fits my domain - and site - name. It's not the end of the world, but the floodgates have already been opened.
fwiw, because of this discussion, i just got "@jcs" from a user that had it since 2007 and only had one tweet (the account was obviously fake).
i opened a support ticket with twitter and asked them about reclaiming the username. their auto-responder said they will only take an active account if it's due to a trademark claim, but if the account is inactive (meaning no logins or other activity on the backend in a long time), they will free up the username. they won't directly assign the inactive username to you, they just make it available for registration.
the auto-reply said they will investigate how inactive an account is if you ask them to, so i asked them to for this account. two days later they replied and said it had been made available, so i quickly went into my settings and changed my username to it. all of the followers and everything migrates to the new username, but any old links or tweets referencing the old username don't forward. hopefully my old username is not released back into the pool for at least a while.
I don't know if this would work, but couldn't one theoretically just get a large number of people to mark the desired account as spam?
I have no idea how Twitter deals with their spam reporting, but ostensibly Twitter would deactivate the account and once again make it open to registration.
I have no idea how Twitter deals with their spam reporting, but ostensibly Twitter would deactivate the account and once again make it open to registration.
I've had some experience with this, and I don't think so. I wrote customer support not long ago to request a name be released (clear spam account) and was told, "Nope, we don't do that any longer." The account is gone now. But if you try to sign up with that name, it's reported as "taken" anyhow.
Short version: they seem not to release names, even after the accounts go away. Maybe there's a waiting period. I'm still hoping.