If you follow any celebrities on Twitter you may have noticed that the site has started to verify some celeb's pages. For example, check out Quest Love of the Roots or Oprah's twitter page and notice right above their name the little checkmark and "verified account" badge. If you click the badge it takes you to a page that explains the how and why they're doing it (see here).
I have nothing against this idea. I actually think it's a good idea. Big businesses and well known celebrity names carry heavy influence over people, and an impostor can screw up their public image very quickly. If I owned a large company I wouldn't want people who have nothing to do with me saying things and claiming they've come from me. Doesn't even matter if it's positive or negative, it's still not really me. I'm sure you can all relate to the feeling.
However, since I'm not a big company or a big celebrity (yet) I was kind of weirded out to be asked to verify myself. I wasn't asked by Twitter either. I was asked by a regular everyday person whom I had added to my list earlier in the day.
I was adding some people in my industry for networking purposes while in my new home down under when I received a DM saying "[username] uses TrueTwit validation service. Please follow this link to validate your profile." Check out the service for yourself here.
Esentially, it's a service that asks anyone who follows the person using it to go to a website and enter a captcha to prove they're a real person. The service then sends the user an email that says I'm a real person, you can now check to see if you want to follow them back.
This is kind of crazy if you ask me. As I've mentioned in other posts, I don't believe in auto-follow-backs of people that add me. I like to check peoples profiles before I add them to my Twitter list. You can usually tell within 10 seconds if the page is a real person or a spam page. Heck, I don't follow everyone that follows me even if they are a real person.
Besides the laziness of the service, because we all know how much effort it takes to click a few links and look at a twitter page for 10 seconds, there was something else that got me about this service.
I could have signed myself up for the service which would have made me one of those auto-DMers that I hate, but it also would have automatically verified my "realness" to anyone else using the service that may have wanted to add me.
If I could create a spam page and then sign it up for the service so that my spam page is automatically verified... doesn't that defeat the whole point of the service??
Just a thought.
40deuce
