I ran into The Google Cemetery the other day, a site that lists Google products that have come and gone. Google receives a lot of criticism when they discontinue a product, which is odd for a couple reasons. First, the products are free, so no one is entitled to them. Second, it’s great for a company to try things that might not succeed; the alternative is to ossify and die.
In that spirit, I thought I’d celebrate some of my Twitter accounts that have come and gone.
Dormant accounts
My first daily tip Twitter account was SansMouse, an account that posted one keyboard shortcut per day. I later renamed the account ShortcutKeyTip. I also had an account PerlRegex for Perl regular expressions, DailySymbol for symbols, and BasicStatistics for gardening. Just kidding about that last one; it was for basic statistics.
Donated accounts
I started RLangTip and then handed it over to people who were more enthusiastic about R. I also started MusicTheoryTip and gave it away.
Renamed accounts
The account GrokEM was for electricity and magnetism. I renamed it ScienceTip and broadened the content to be science more generally. I also had an account SedAwkTip for, you guessed it, sed and awk. It also broadened its content and became UnixToolTip.
I renamed StatFact to DataSciFact and got an immediate surge in followers. Statistics sells better when you change the label to data science, machine learning, or artificial intelligence.
Resurrected accounts
I stopped posting to my signal processing account DSP_fact for a while and then started it up again. I also let my FormalFact account lie fallow for a while, then renamed it LogicPractice and restarted it. It’s the only one of my accounts I don’t post to regularly.
Rejected accounts
I had several other ideas for accounts that I never started. They will probably never see the light of day. I have no intention of starting any new accounts at this time, but I might someday. I also might retire some of my existing accounts.
Graphic design
Here’s a collage of the icons for my accounts as eight years ago:
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The icons became more consistent over time, and now all my Twitter accounts have similar icons: blue dots with a symbol inside. I’m happy with the current design for now.
