Owner of @alphabet handle awaits Google’s call

It seems the owner of the @alphabet twitter handle was taken as much by suprise as the rest of the world when Google announced its name-change on Monday.

The newly-consituted company does not own the @alphabet handle but its owner, Chris Andrikanich, can probably expect a call from Google's new umbrella parent.

Andrikanich, listed on his twitter bio as a dad and husband describes himself as a “self-proclaimed geek who fires off regular gibberish, gobblety-gook about sports, tech, CLE, and whatever...”

Tweeting on Monday evening, Andrikanich said “Well, that was an interesting way to end a Monday...”

Speaking in an interview with US website Buzzfeed, Andrikanich said: "It's crazy. It's nerve-racking. It's entirely unbelievable."

Andrikanich told the interviewer he has not yet been contacted by Alphabet but said he would be open to offers.

“There’s a lot of optimistic people out there on my behalf,” he said.

“Optimistic about what?” he was asked.

“Everyone keeps saying that I’m going to get rich.”

Interestingly, the company formerly known as Google does not own the Alphabet.com web address either.

According to the Who Is internet company look-up service, ownership of alphabet.com falls to German car maker BMW, and the site, while slow to load at the time of writing, has been online since August 1995.

Google's new parent does have its own website which can be found at abc.xyz.

The site bears a message from Google co-founder Larry Page and a link to Google's investor relations page.

Visitors to the site are met with the message: “As Sergey and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, ‘Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.’”

Naturally enough, it didn’t take long for visitors to the new website to discover a hidden link further down the page.

When readers click on the word 'more' that follows Larry Page's introduction on the home page and then upon the full stop at the end of the sentence ending with "our drone delivery effort" they will be taken to the website of Hooli, the fictional company in the HBO series Silicon Valley.