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Shel Holtz
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I surrender. @shelholtz is my new Twitter handle

I give up. I can’t take it any more.

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I’ve thrown in the towel and renamed my Twitter account from @shel to @shelholtz.

If you think this is because of the number of people who have been tweeting to me when they meant to tweet to Shel Israel, that’s not it. I’ve met some great people while directing them to Shel’s account, and I’m happy for any excuse to touch base with my namesake.

No, this was another problem, one I just couldn’t tolerate any longer. Here’s what was happening:

Somebody would tweet something like this:

Shel Holtz

Note that the first four letter of @Shelton_Scott begin with “shel.”

Now, somebody copies that message, adds some commentary, and tweets it without checking the character count. It comes out like this:

Shel Holtz

Which means all these messages come to me even though they have nothing to do with me. And they drive me nuts trying to figure out why the hell I’m getting them until I see the ellipses. To make matters worse, 90% of these messages are in Tagalog.

It happens 15, 20 times a day.

So I finally decided, the hell with it. I’ll sacrifice the five extra characters in order to get messages that are meant only for me.

I still have the @shel account and will be watching it for a while to make sure everyone knows where I am now.

(Note: A tremendous shout-out to Laura Fitton—@pistachio—for helping me figure out how to make the change considering I already owned both these accounts; all the instructions I found called for creating a new account.)

02/02/10 | 9 Comments | I surrender. @shelholtz is my new Twitter handle

Comments

  • 1.I'd be really interested in seeing Laura's instructions for switching accounts. After being on Twitter for a while I've rethought what my name should be but don't want to cause too much confusion when changing.

    Dagan Henderson | February 2010 | Walnut Grove, CA

  • 2.That's an interesting glitch, I wasn't aware of the ellipses mechanic.
    When I changed my handle I had to go through the same trouble though. So easy in hindsight but you'd think Twitter would have an How-to or a contact email. Took me a while til somebody pointed out the workaround to me.

    Sebastian | February 2010 | Hamburg, Germany

  • 3.Shel Holtz--I think if you change your Twitter handle all your followers go with you (you appear in their stream with your new handle) and all your lists, etc do too. You only need to change links to your Twitter home page if you've added them to a blog, web page etc.

    I said "think." Maybe you could blog about it if you find out for sure?

    Tim Penning, APR | February 2010 | Michigan

  • 4.Rather than setting up a new account - why didn't you just switch to your new ID within your existing profile?

    Daniel | February 2010 | sydney

  • 5.@Daniel, I already owned the @shelholtz account, so I couldn't just change. Ultimately, though, I did just change the account name within the existing account -- after I altered the account name in @shelholtz.

    @Dagan, that's what Laura had me do:

    1) Change @shelholtz to @temporaryshel
    2) Change @shel to @shelholtz
    3) Change @temporaryshel to @shel

    @Tim, this means, yes, my followers, lists, etc. all come with me.

    Shel Holtz | February 2010 | Concord, CA

  • 6.Yikes! That must have been pretty frustrating. I always wondered if you got a lot of people looking for Shel Israel. Like you said, it's not horrible to be confused with him! :)

    Sharon Vaknin | February 2010 | SF Bay

  • 7.I'm glad you changed it. Everytime I tried to type "@shel" my autocorrect would make it "@she'll". In fact, it just did it now.

    steve levine | February 2010

  • 8.Wait a minute! All this time I thought this was the Shel who is mayor of Twitterville! Now I'm really confused.

    Bernie Goldbach | February 2010 | Cashel, Ireland

  • 9.Shel,

    At least now there can be no mistake it is you!

    Mark D. | February 2010

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