It’s Time for Twitter Premium Accounts

By Steve Poland   •   December 19, 2008

Former TechCrunch writer Nick Gonzalez’s post “Who Owns Your Social Media Accounts“, as a reply to my Twitter Needs Better Username Policy (the ‘celtics’ fiasco), got me thinking…

This is the perfect opportunity for Twitter to start with Premium accounts. Charging whatever the price may be — $3/mo or $3/yr for example. The user then locks in their Twitter username and similar rules that govern domains are applied. First come, first served — and of course an arbitrator if there’s a trademark conflict.

A Twitter username can serve as an identity to someone, just as a phone number does. As Nick mentions, it’d be a cruel world if the phone company just swiped your cell phone number and changed it on you — wouldn’t it?

The question still remains, if my ‘celtics’ account had been all about Celtic Knots, would Twitter have confiscated my username and handed it over to the Boston Celtics NBA team? [Are they even sure it is the Boston Celtics NBA team, and not just some other person out there pretending to be them?]




Related posts:

  1. Evan - Twitter needs a better policy on Usernames Evan, I have a bunch of Twitter usernames — I gobbled them up in March 2007. I’d consider them some of the “quality” ones. Almost like the domain game of 1995, I grabbed some of...
  2. IDEA #65 - Universal Login that verifies/ties your Digg, MySpace, FB, etc Accounts together Another submission to Startup Weekend in Toronto… Universal Login that verifies/ties your Digg, MySpace, Facebook, etc Accounts together Contributor: Steve Poland I know there’s OpenID, and quite frankly I don’t know enough about it. And...
  3. ASK STEVE #5 - Posting to all your Social accounts in one click Steve, Hey, we’re working on http://wheezio.uk.to It will allow people to easily add all their twitter, jaiku, pownce, facebook, livejournal, blogger etc accounts. The users will then be able to simply write whatever they want...
  4. “Pull” Twitter Apps Not Practical Until… “Pull” Twitter apps aren’t very practical until a setting is added to each user account. Right now, if someone adds me as a friend — I still can’t receive any direct messages they send me,...
  5. Twitter - What Will Dominate: Content Push or Content Pull? I don’t know what will blow up and be used more on Twitter — content push plays, or pull plays. Push would be having ‘NFL’ as a friend and getting all the latest NFL news...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Comments

3 Responses to “It’s Time for Twitter Premium Accounts”

  1. MyAvatars 0.2 » Evan - Twitter needs a better policy on Usernames - By Steve Poland - Ideas for Making Money Online on December 19th, 2008 7:27 pm (perm link)

    [...] Update 6: Former TechCrunch writer Nick Gonzalez chimes in with a post of “Who Owns Your Social Media Accounts?” I reply with a post of my own, “It’s Time for Twitter Premium Accounts“ [...]

  2. MyAvatars 0.2 Lucious on December 28th, 2008 6:57 pm (perm link)

    A bit mistified as to why a column/blog in the NYT online tech section would want to link to your blog. Has something to do with twitter but I think the NYT blogger is gay and has a crush on you.

    Yu ought to hit him up, I’m betting he has lots of money making ideals for you.

  3. MyAvatars 0.2 Jean carl on January 19th, 2009 11:49 am (perm link)

    if twitter ask for a premium and consider itself as a DNS, it is as far i am concerned the biggest hold up organised by a tech service for the decade to come.

    i really do not care to be called jcarl or jcarlo or anything else.
    every service could do that, six apart as well in that case, blogger as well

    it is not a service that can be billed

Got something to say?





*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word