Twitter has a problem with usernames, but it doesn’t admit it is a real issue. Actually, it is ignoring it, most likely because the Twitter team doesn’t think it is a significant issue. They are probably looking at it from a programming- or database-perspective, when they should understand the implications it has on the Twitter brand.

At the point where Twitter is now, with more than a million users worldwide, it has already reached the zenith of social applications. Like Facebook and Myspace, it has gained enough strength that it can afford to ignore user requests or even bad press. This only works until a certain point of course, as if there’s enough users and enough press demanding different behavior, any brand can be forced to change.

What’s the issue?

There is an option on the Twitter user profile that lets you enter your real name. The space is limited to 20 characters, including empty spaces. This is probably more than enough for the majority of names, because most regular names are somewhere between 15 and 18 characters, even if they include middle names.

The idea of providing space for your real name is to let other people find you. If a friend of yours knows you are on Twitter, but he doesn’t know your Twitter name, he can simply search for your first or last name. I don’t know why, but Twitter’s name search is very limited. It doesn’t allow you to search for a full name (first and last name) at once.

My name is Henning von Vogelsang. It’s not Henning Vogelsang and not H. von Vogelsang. But if I want to use my real name, Twitter forces me to cut it off at one or the other ending, because otherwise people will never find me through Twitter’s people search. I am probably one in a hundred people with this problem, and therefore my issue does not pose a relevant problem to Twitter. They don’t see harm in ignoring it. When I reported this problem to Twitter, I got a simple answer: “As of now, this all the space we have. Sorry.”

I wanted to know if I am alone with this problem, so I ran a little experiment using the IMDB (International Movie Database). Out of 50 names, only nine had names with more than 20 characters. That doesn’t seem a lot, and the experiment wasn’t really scientific. Still, 4.5% of all names I found in this random search wouldn’t be able to use their real names on Twitter. The actors Stephen O’Neil Martin, Clifton MaCabe Murray, Ricardo Antonio Chavira, Desiree April Connolly are out of luck.

Why is this an issue?

Plane tickets produce a similar problem. You cannot enter long names on tickets because there is not enough space. But a plane ticket isn’t a business card, it is used once, thrown away afterwards, and the only people looking at it are flight attendants and yourself.

Imagine the same restriction would apply to all business cards. “I’m sorry Sir, but 20 characters is all the space we have”. What would Barrack Hussein Obama do, or Robert Louis Stevenson? Sure, the president doesn’t use his middle name anyway. But what about people with long first and surnames? They are out of luck. If you have a long name and you want a business card, you either change your name or you’ll have to cut it off. Your business card is your personal contact you put in the hands of your acquaintance. Who wants a crippled version of his name on a business card?

What the Twitter team forgets is that a name is very personal. It’s part of your identity. Whether you liked it from the start or not, you end up living with it all your life. You introduce yourself to someone with your full name. “Di Caprio”, “La Roche”, “McGuire”—no one is looking for “Caprio” only. And none of these people would want to give up a part of their name, particularly not when they’re introducing themselves.

A name is not a message. It’s the signature of your identity.

There are some Twitter-users who get upset when someone types “Twitter” with a capital T. It’s spelled “twitter”, they say, based on the logo on the Twitter homepage. I’m a consultant for brands and I hear this all the time: people working in a company have a strong connection to how their brand is spelled. Dare you, if you spell the “new at&t” with capital letters, like it used to be until they changed their corporate design. People have a strong connection with names, even more so when it comes to their own.

Technical background of the Twitter name issue

If you wouldn’t know what was the reason behind the limited name space, you might assume it is a stupid restriction, comparable to the millenium bug. It looks like no one ever thought of the implications a 20 character space restriction could cause.

If you know a little more about how Twitter is built, you’ll understand they are now stuck with 20 characters, unless they are changing a substantial part of their database-backend. For each message, Twitter provides a total space of 160 characters. 140 characters are for your message, 20 characters are for your name, which is assigned with each message. Should they ever want to change one of these two numbers, it will automatically increase or reduce the other number. Adding a single space to the name field would cut the message off at 139 characters. Given the fact that by now Twitter must have several million messages stored in its database, it is highly unrealistic they will ever change the 140 character rule.

What’s the solution?

For now, there is none. While I’m left with speculation regarding Twitter’s further intentions to address this issue, I assume they are aware of it. If it was easy, I guess they would have changed it already. A blog post by Paul Holmes indicates that they’re aware of the restrictions caused by the current setup, which apparently doesn’t only affect regular users with long names. On the long run, this may become a big problem for Twitter’s expansion as a service and brand.

According to the Twitter VP of Operations, Santosh Jayaram, who previously worked on Google’s search quality team, big improvements on Twitter’s search capabilities are in the works. It is not unlikely that Twitter will improve the current name search with wildcards and live-search capabilities.

Whenever there is no good solution, there is usually a workaround. In my case I changed the first name to its initial letter, so at least people can find me by my last name, which is pretty unique. If I would have changed the last name, the chance of finding me through people search would be nonexistent.

It is not a satisfying workaround though. It was forced upon me and frankly, it put a little bump into my image of the brand Twitter. Nothing is perfect in this world, but Twitter was pretty much perfect for me up to this point.