Inasmuch as I’m now with Antenna House, I’ve been changing over to new usernames for Skype, etc. That seemed straightforward enough when I picked tgraham.antenna for Skype, but then I found that GitHub doesn’t allow “.” in usernames, so on GitHub, I’m tgraham-antenna. Which has left me wondering, what are the allowed non-alphabetic characters in the networks of interest?
- Twitter allows that “A username can only contain alphanumeric characters (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9) with the exception of underscores”.
- App.net allows “lower case letters, numerical digits, and underscores” in usernames. They also “only display the username in lower case letters.”
- You won’t find me on Facebook, but they want your real name and only your real name.
If I was starting again, I might have gone for “TGrahamAntenna” or even “AHTony” everywhere, despite the risk of the name being illegible when reduced to a single case. But I didn’t start again, so I’m now @tgraham_antenna on Twitter (and I’ll get around to App.net sometime).