Twitter – in case you hadn’t noticed – is becoming so mainstream there’s now even at least one third-party business dedicated to finding the best available account names.

The Twitter open account search comes courtesy of Domain Pigeon, which previously focused on searching for unregistered URLs, so extending that to the microblogging phenom is hardly a stretch.

Three letters

Naturally, the most sought-after Twitter usernames are the shortest ones – three characters is the minimum, of which about 18,000 are still available, we’re told.

Before you rush off to see if xxx or abc are still up for grabs, be warned that Domain Pigeon requires a one-off membership fee of $40 (£27).

Considering that, maybe your next Tweet can be something like “@domainpigeon You’ve got to be kidding.”

Not kidding. :D