I am not sure if there are any Twitter rules that were created to specifically eliminate the use of usernames that may infringe on registered trademarks.

With the growing popularity of Twitter, and the widespread knowledge and existence of domain squatting, it was only a matter of time before squatting wars reach Twitter.

I was in the process of some branding-related research when I stumbled upon a very interesting Twitter status of what seems to be the official Twitter page for Fly.com (@fly_com).

” @spam the @fly profile is a squatter”

At the time of writing, the Twitter account @Fly only had 2 tweets, which just barely says “Hello”. Looking a bit closer, I noticed that the first Tweet was made on 2nd March 2009, a month after the Fly.com domain name was sold for $1,760,000, on 3rd February. Perhaps the sale was reported around the beginning of March?

It should be interesting to see what happens next, if anything will happen in terms of the @fly Twitter account.

In my opinion, there is some form Twitter Squatting going on. I tried to secure the Twitter accounts for some domains that I intend to develop, only to find that the usernames are already taken. Most of them have no pictures, updates and/or even followers.

It is becoming obvious that not only has a company got to ensure that it secures the right domain name, but it has to ensure that it also secures the username for the domain/brand on major social networking sites.

The question is, how do Twitter squatters, if there are any, plan to benefit from this type of squatting?

Welcome to the new world of social networking media, and branding!

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