To get people to delete their (probably long-forgotten) inactive Twitter accounts, some students from Rotterdam-based Willem de Kooning Academy created a ridiculously catchy @twittersong, with lyrics created by combining—and calling out!—handles that have been dead since March 2016.
"Hey you, the one who's still in their eggshell," a folksy voice sings, "Yeah you, the one who didn't say farewell. You didn't have anything to say, no tweets were coming your way. So you decided not to stay ... but why did you never fly away?"
That's some clever word engineering!
Creators include Mick Jongeling, former junior art director at JWT in Amsterdam.
A 2014 Twopcharts study found Twitter had almost 430 million inactive users, which at the time totaled nearly half of its 974 million registered users. Some 44 percent of those 430 million had never tweeted at all. Many might just have been abandoned, but lots of currently inactive accounts are likely also spambots and squatted names.
In case you wondered why anybody would care about a bunch of dead eggs, the song explains that, too: "Did you know that you hold up space? And know how much electricity it takes to keep your profile here online? So please recycle for a better world offline."
(It's not much written down, but it sounds way better in the video.)
So there you have it. Delete your old or languishing Twitter accounts. While you're at it, maybe poke around for your dead MySpace, Yahoo, AsianAvenue, Friendster and Foursquare accounts, too. In addition to healing the world, now's a good time to ensure the internet hasn't kept any awkward iterations of your existence before Instagram filters and hashtags like #blessed existed to make us all look better than we actually feel.