Twitter announced that they will be implementing an account verification system to help prevent people from impersonating other people. According to the Twitter blog, “The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.”
I think this is definitely a good idea and something that should have been done long ago, however, I find it rather silly that they cannot implement this for everyone immediately. Danny Sullivan wrote a post a while ago explaining a way Twitter could easily have people verify their account. It really shouldn’t require many resources to put something that can generate a unique file name or meta tag which can be implemented on a site and checked by Twitter.
I’m sorry Twitter but your service is growing very rapidly and you are responsible for maintaining the service for everyone – not just the “well-known” people (that includes keeping the site fully operational). It seems every time Twitter does something it is a completely half-assed attempt and to me that is just unacceptable. I would understand if they had written in the blog post that they have the functionality already created and were rolling it out to these people first, but, that is not what they said. Instead they talk about the amount resources necessary to do a rather simple thing as the reason for why the feature is not available to everyone. Completely ridiculous if you ask me.
Lastly, the blog post talks about Twitter having an interest in account verification for businesses while noting that business account verification will not be available initially. Perhaps they are looking to charge companies for verifying their Twitter accounts? Possibly. We’ll have to keep an eye on that.
