Mysteriously Unnamed

fruji · 2012-09-06T15:04:25.000Z

I keep getting a lot of “Mysteriously Unnamed” accounts when scanning through large follower bases (users with more than 1M+ followers). They all return an empty “screen_name”, and I took a few of those and investigated with other Twitter tools and saw that these accounts are accessible through the web on Twitter.com and are all named “Mysteriously Unnamed”. I’ve found a bug discussion from March 2011 on this but it was never followed up once a request was posted that you guys at Twitter should be notified about more of these accounts.

Just wanted to ask for a quick public update on how to deal with these accounts. Skip and treat as non-accounts? There are many! The issue is that each one of them takes away at least one API call and rate limits is still a precious commodity.

Thanks!

fruji · 2012-09-06T15:06:00.000Z

Here’s an example account:
http://twitter.com/1120662/

Here’s a site from a guy who likes collecting these:
http://www.whisthis.com/mysteriously_unnamed.php

Here’s the original discussion from March 2011:
http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=209

episod · 2012-09-06T15:20:34.000Z

These are mobile-only “fast follow” users: http://blog.twitter.com/2010/08/introducing-fast-follow-and-other-sms.html

fruji · 2012-09-06T15:22:36.000Z

Alright, got it. Thanks Taylor, strange I never found a link to this elsewhere. This certainly clears it up for future reference.

Tafakkar · 2013-03-05T17:23:56.000Z

How do I know the number of followers of this type?

steinnate · 2013-07-19T02:13:06.000Z

Please please help! I made a fastfollower account back in December of 2009 with handle @natesteiner. A few years later I created a twitter, totally forgetting about the first one I made. Today I tried seeing if I could access the old one, since that has my original name (but I was unsuccessful with both email and phone number, because I never remember even making a password for that account, since it was all via SMS!! Please help me do so! Or when will this account be deleted so I can have the name that is rightfully mine?

I’d appreciate any help. Thank you so much!