@I to @Me: An Anatomy of Username Changing Behavior on Twitter

TL;DR

This study analyzes username changing behavior on Twitter, revealing that about 10% of users change usernames for various reasons, with active and popular users more likely to do so, and past usernames influencing future choices.

Contribution

First comprehensive analysis of username change patterns on Twitter, linking user activity, popularity, and past usernames to behavior, with implications for user suggestions and account linking.

Findings

10% of users change usernames for reasons like space, followers, promotion

Users often revert to recent past usernames rather than older ones

Active and popular users are more likely to change usernames

Abstract

An identity of a user on an online social network (OSN) is defined by her profile, content and network attributes. OSNs allow users to change their online attributes with time, to reflect changes in their real-life. Temporal changes in users' content and network attributes have been well studied in literature, however little research has explored temporal changes in profile attributes of online users. This work makes the first attempt to study changes to a unique profile attribute of a user - username and on a popular OSN which allows users to change usernames multiple times - Twitter. We collect, monitor and analyze 8.7 million Twitter users at macroscopic level and 10,000 users at microscopic level to understand username changing behavior. We find that around 10% of monitored Twitter users opt to change usernames for possible reasons such as space gain, followers gain, and username promotion. Few users switch back to any of their past usernames, however prefer recently dropped usernames to switch back to. Users who change usernames are more active and popular than users who don't. In-degree, activity and account creation year of users are weakly correlated with their frequency of username change. We believe that past usernames of a user and their associated benefits inferred from the past, can help Twitter to suggest its users a set of suitable usernames to change to. Past usernames may also help in other applications such as searching and linking multiple OSN accounts of a user and correlating multiple Twitter profiles to a single user.