Deleting Your Twitter Account

I have the feeling that you're going to love Twitter, but it's also true that microblogging isn't for everyone. The constant pressure to answer the canonical Twitter question "What are you doing?" may simply become too much after a while. If taking a short break doesn't help (I'm talking about a few days or even a few weeks, not a few minutes), then you can walk away and move on with your life. You could opt to let your account lie dormant (it is, after all, free), but if there are updates

you want to get rid of, or if you don't want new people to follow you, then you should delete your Twitter account.

Of course, it could be that you love the whole Twitter thing, perhaps even to the extent that you've created multiple Twitter accounts. Lots of people juggle multiple Twitter identities (I have two, myself ), but it requires lots of logging in and out, and lots of extra work updating and maintaining each account. If it all just gets to be too much, you might want to delete one or more of your accounts so you can finally get some sleep at night.

Resetting Your Twitter Password

Okay, so you've been on vacation for a couple of weeks, or your nose has been grindstone-bound while you finish off a few projects, and so you've been away from the Twitterverse for a bit. It happens even to the most dedicated Twitterers. You return to the login screen and, doh!, you've forgotten your password. You try all your old favorites, but no joy. You're locked out of your Twitter account!

Fortunately, all is not lost. You can ask the kind folks at Twitter to reset your password, which will get you back up and tweeting in just a few minutes. Here's what you do:

     1. Send your Web browser to https://twitter.com/account/resend_password. The

Forgot your password? page appears 

2. Type your Twitter username in the text box. You can also type the e-mail address that you associated with your Twitter account.

      3. Click Reset my password. Twitter ships you an e-mail message (Subject line: "Reset your

    Twitter password") that includes a link to a password reset page. 

4. When you get the message, click the link. Your default Web browser pops up and takes you to the password reset page.

      5. Type your new password in the New Password and Verify New Password text boxes.

      6. Click Change. Twitter resets your account with the new password.

Changing Your Twitter Password

When you forged your new Twitter account, you had to specify an account password, and Twitter is security-minded enough to rate your password on-the-fly: Weak, Good, Strong, or Very Strong. If you settled for a Weak or even just a Good rating, you might be having second thoughts and feel you'd sleep better at night with a Strong or even a Very Strong password.

Conversely, you might be wondering what's the big whoop about a Twitter password? After all, it's just your Twitter account. It's not like you're exposing your finances or national security secrets to the world (I'm assuming here you're not the Secretary of State). True enough, but it's also true that Twitter accounts have been hacked in the past, with the accounts of Britney Spears and a Twitter staffer (who was using the password "happiness," which is about as weak as they come) being the most notorious. If you're using your real name with your Twitter account, then you definitely don't want some malicious hacker having his way with this part of your online identity.

Fortunately, changing the password for your Twitter account isn't much harder than what you had to go through in the first place:

 1. Sign in to your Twitter account.

 2. Click Settings. The Settings page appears.

 3. Click the Password tab.

 4. Use the Current Password text box to type your existing Twitter password.

 5. Type your new password in the New Password and Verify New Password text boxes.

 6. Click Change. Twitter updates your account with the new password.

 

Viewing Twitter’s Current Status

Twitter puts the fun in funky and the hip in friendship, but it can also sometimes put the ugh in ugly. I'm talking here about Twitter's occasional reliability problems. Twitter's original infrastructure wasn't built to handle the massive amounts of traffic it now bears, so every so often there will be a hiccup, a glitch, or even an outright failure.

These failures arise when Twitter's server simply gets overloaded, so it can't process any new data until some processing power is freed up. You know this is the case when you try to do something

on Twitter and you see, instead, the infamous fail whale, shown in figure 1.2.

 
1.2 If Twitter gets overwhelmed by updates, the impossible-not-to-love fail whale shows up to let you know.

The good news is that the fail whale's moment on the stage is almost always mercifully brief, so you should be able to continue what you were doing in a few seconds or, at most, a few minutes. You'll also be happy to know that our friend the fail whale shows up far less often than he (she?) used to. Over the past few months, Twitter has made impressive strides in not only plugging the leaks but also shoring up the foundations, so the service is now more reliable than ever.

Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it's 100% reliable (online, nothing is). The fail whale still drops by unannounced on occasion, but Twitter also suffers from other gremlins from time to time. For example, you might see the whimsically mysterious "Something is technically wrong" page, shown in figure 1 3, if Twitter blows the online equivalent of a gasket.

So it pays to keep on top of Twitter's current status. There are a couple of ways you can do this.

First, send your Web browser to http://status.twitter.com/ to open the Twitter Status page, which displays updates on Twitter woes and worries, as shown in figure 1.4.