Speculation in Twitter IDs, aka handles, has begun. I spotted an auction on eBay for the Twitter ID @powerseller. I’ve been wondering for about a year now whether Twitter “handle” speculation would become popular in the same way as domain name speculation, with people securing Twitter IDs hoping they have resale value.

This strategy is going to have the same effects as domain name speculation:

• Like domains, the best Twitter IDs for many businesses will be held by speculators who have an inflated, dot-com boom notion of their worth, forcing smaller companies to adopt “workaround” IDs with hyphens or extra words in them.
• Large corporations will crush speculators who attempt to hold online IDs that are part of an established, valuable corporate brand. For example, someone has already registered @mcdonalds on Twitter. This could be the harbinger of a Twitter presence for McDonald’s, or is more likely a speculator. You can bet if it is the latter, McDonald’s will crush the current holder of the ID if he/she does not surrender it willingly, should McDonald’s decide it wants it.
• There have been many instances of people securing Twitter handles and posing as someone else. This is easy, given Twitter’s lightweight registration process, and its loosely written Terms of Service, which bans impersonation, and lack of enforcement on this point. (See for example @billgates or @sethgodin, ersatz celebrities on Twitter.)
• Ultimately, Twitter handles probably belong to Twitter, and there may be some disappointments ahead for speculators.

@andrewbaron ’s recent eBay auction of his Twitter ID and followers does not really come under this heading, but is interesting for what we can observe from it - there is a market for Twitter presence in whatever form. The auction went past $1500 before Baron canceled it.

My assumption is that if eBay decided to have a Twitter presence for its PowerSeller program, and felt @powerseller was the best ID for this purpose, they would simply take it from whomever currently holds it.

While eBay may consider PowerSeller a trade mark, or copyrighted reference, it has allowed independent use of the PowerSeller name, so there are certainly possibilities for building a legitimate business with the ID. If someone purchases the ID, and uses it to build a genuine eBay PowerSeller community on Twitter, then not only does that have general value, but eBay might want to just leave it alone and be grateful that its PowerSeller program has so many passionate and engaged participants.

I do advise clients who become aware of grassroots community efforts, rather than seeing these as threatening, to instead monitor the conversations, and join in if the forum is genuine and constructive. This is a separate topic, but it’s part of the whole dynamic of what happens when private individuals co-opt, for whatever reason, bits and pieces of a corporation’s identity.

The larger issue with this is the erosion of trust in Twitter as a social network. Before it was revealed that @sethgodin was not Seth Godin (the ruse was carried out very effectively), people were thrilled that Seth had a presence on Twitter. The Twitter Turing test is an easy one. In Godin’s case, what easily passed as “authentic, transparent 1:1 conversation” was completely inauthentic, and for a time, the deception was undetectable.

If there is a question, then community policing of Twitter-based deception and co-opting of brands and company names is not a sustainable answer. Twitter may want to adopt a commercial ID registration process in which holders of these handles certify ownership of the brand name, product name, etc.

If, on the other hand, you support free reign in the assignment and use of brand-like Twitter names, then you should expect that the “information” offered by these users could be completely worthless. What if toshibaflatscreen tells you it offers 1080p resolution, and you buy it, and find it doesn’t? Who do you hold responsible? For this reason alone, it’s unlikely that in the long term, large companies will tolerate any abuses of their brand and company names.

Tags: twitter, domain name, handle, speculation, powerseller, @andrewbaron, ebay