Some jerkwad is squatting on the perfect Twitter username for your next project… What do you do? Complain on the basis of a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service? I don’t think so… that might wake up the absentee user, then you’d never get the name.

If you have access to a shell, try this curl command to send yourself a Direct Message when the Twitter user’s profile page returns an HTTP 404. Substitute the right values for DESIREDUSERNAME, USERNAME and PASSWORD:

curl -Is http://twitter.com/DESIREDUSERNAME | awk '/Status: 404 Not Found/ { system ("curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d \"text=@DESIREDUSERNAME Twitter account is AVAILABLE%21&user=USERNAME\" http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml")}'

Set it and forget it by adding the command to a cronjob using the command:

$ crontab -e

0 * * * * curl -Is http://twitter.com/DESIREDUSERNAME | awk '/Status: 404 Not Found/ { system ("curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d \"text=@DESIREDUSERNAME Twitter account is AVAILABLE%21&user=USERNAME\" http://twitter.com/direct_messages/new.xml")}'

There you go! Every hour, this pure shell script will check if the Twitter user name is still available. If not, you’ll get a Direct Message letting you know… =)

P.S. Not sure what the status is of a Twitter profile page when the Fail Whale makes an appearance. Probably have to modify the AWK script to handle that case. Will keep an eye on it!