When your Twitter handle is one letter, you know you're big

Wrote Alexis Madrigal in a January 19, 2011 post on theatlantic.com, "Ever since the AOL days, few things have been as lame as a username that's too long. A name like Staggerlee9778... has long been a sign of late adoption."

Wrote Katherine Rosman in a Wall Street Journal article that same day, ""Single-name sign-ins are cool because they're hard to come by. They are the first handles to be nabbed at a start-up, often by employees, their friends and family, sometimes by venture capitalists, angel investors, engineers and executives. Being @you, especially on a social-media site that becomes a mass-market success, proves you are an early adopter, in on the ground floor of the next big thing."

More from Madrigal: "But there's an even more elite group of names out there, at least on Twitter: the single letters. Because Twitter limits the number of characters for each message to 140, @J has a decided advantage over @alexismadrigal. Beyond that, there is some real status in being one of the 26 people who go by a single character. It's like the nanocelebrity version of going just by Ronaldo or Nico or Dr. J."

Up top, a gallery of the single letters of Twitter.

FunFact: @R (one Rex Hammock of Nashville, Tennessee) and I are Twitter follower x followee.