Twitter and the ‘verified accounts’ announcement

Twitter. Most of us are now signed up to the service and have integrated updates into our daily routine. Having breakfast, tweet it. Getting dressed, tweet it. Heading to work, tweet it. Something interesting happening at work, tweet it. News breaking, tweet it.

Many (including myself) struggled to understand Twitter’s purpose at the beginning, thinking of it as nothing short than a poor man’s Facebook.

Twitter was lucky to get early celebrity endorsements from Jonathon Ross, Philip Schofield, Lily Allan, Russel Brand and hundreds of other celebs. They were all using Twitter and telling the world they were doing so! As a result, profile registrations went through the roof.

I plugged on with mine and over time picked up a decent amount of followers. Now, I can speak to the tech editor of the BBC for instance without having to make a call or send an email. I can tell exactly what Stuff magazine is writing about and can read TechDigest’s reviews as soon as they go live by clicking a single link from their Tweets.

Of course, similar to Facebook, fake profiles are often created and sometimes hard to distinguish. Twitter has moved somewhat quicker than Facebook to counter this, and is now veryfying accounts. I’ll let Pocket-Lint explain this part!

Article by Duncan Geere, Pocket-Lint;

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/news.phtml/24736/twitter-verified-accounts-go-live.phtml

‘The launch of Twitter’s “verified accounts” functionality was promised to us earlier in the week, and here it is. Various celebrities including Oprah Winfrey, MC Hammer and Ashton Kutcher have now got “verified” badges next to their names.

However so far it appears to be US-only. UK Twitter stars like Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross don’t have the badge. Some obvious candidates in the States are missing it too, like Britney Spears.

The Twitter team cautions us not to assume they’re fakes: “Please note that this doesn’t mean accounts without a verification seal are fake—the vast majority of Twitter accounts are not impersonators”.

As previously reported, the verified accounts are currently invite-only. They’re not available for business yet, either. Many have speculated that charging for a verified account could go some way towards a genuine business model for the microblogging service.’

Adam

Tags: consumer technology, pocket-lint, twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.