I'm interested in this particular thing:

Twitter handle was registered, but had never tweeted and looked abandoned. I contacted a friend who works at Twitter and after a bit of investigation was able to get @learndot as well

Is this something that's easy to do? Can it be done if you don't know anyone inside Twitter? I had to settle for something like @myappnameapp instead of @myappname because the username was already taken but had never been used. I'd be interested to learn what are the Twitter policies regarding this.