Comments on: Time For Verified Twitter Accounts & An Easy Way To Do It

By: Sharif Mohamed

Sharif Mohamed — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:58:11 +0000

Hi Danny, i am a Non-famous Web Celebrity who is from Maldives and currently been Awarded from Mashable and Also CES 2009. I am wondering is why does Twitter activation takes too long?? and why does they leave many peoples who are musician from Asia, Europe, Australia not verified.. I guess this is a big question for Twitter…

I have applied to twitter to verify my account.. but still no result… could you prefer me an option?

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:10:56 +0000

Casey, Twitter could easily know if a site is valid. As I said, this is what Google Webmaster Central already does. You sign-up for an account with Google. They give you a unique code. You put that on your web site. Google sees it, knows that you’ve validated the code.

In the real world, Oprah opens a Twitter account. She puts the code on the Oprah web site. Twitter sees the code, marks Oprah’s account as validated to her site.

Yes, someone could claim Oprah’s name, but they can’t get access to her own web site. As best, they’d have to put together a fake Oprah site and validate to that — as HLDeVore is talking about. But that also poses problems — if Twitter gets a report that the blog is fake, pretty easy to then blacklist it from being part of the verification process in the future.

Nothing’s perfect, but this is an easy way to accelerate the verification process. In addition, it fits into what Twitter is already advising — that if a person doesn’t have one of the new Twitter verification seals, then look to the person’s site and see if they link back to their Twitter account.

By: HLDeVore

HLDeVore — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 02:38:04 +0000

Ditto to Casey’s comment… Danny you’re smart enough to realize that someone who is going to extreme efforts to fake could easily setup a fake blog and then verify…so then a human would need to determine the blog is fake and then Twitter’s scaling of an sort of automation is ruined because humans need to get involved… Ultimately this simply shouldn’t be Twitter’s responsibility. If someone drives in a Dodge pickup truck to commit a bank robbery does Dodge get sued for facilitating and allowing a bankrobber to rob banks? Leave Twitter alone I say and let people chase away and sue the fakes!…Twitter does not need to be the identity cop…that would be ludicrous! If I was a VC or knew a VC who had invested in Twitter (-; I’d tell the VC that Twitter should charge a small fee for verification of accounts…say $10…even just one time ever!? When the account verifies it must agree to legal terms that it DOES NOT impersonate or violate a trademark to the best of it’s knowledge…they must also at that time provide name, address and billing info (which is not currently provided)… THEN a notice to the Twitterverse could be sent that says…”Look, we’ve had a problem. There are jerks out there that impersonate. If you are following a celebrity or a corporation and they have NOT verified you should be a little bit more suspect that they may not be who they say they are… We’re not saying don’t trust unverified accounts…we are saying though trust VERIFIED accounts have pledged that they legally ARE who they say they are…” Thanks TwitterGuys… P.S. – Anybody want to enter the $100,000 competition for ideas for “How to make Twitter money without pissing off the Twitterverse?”… (-:

My two cents for today/tonight…. Goodnight! -H.L.

By: Casey

Casey — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 09:21:42 +0000

(a year later) Good idea, but how would Twitter know if the web site linked is false?

By: bobsocks

bobsocks — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Re Valebrity. Looks like a good idea. But there is considerable work to be done before I would put a lot of faith in it. i.e. does not verify that twitter account is valid, contains bad hyperlinks, etc. But worth watching to see if it gets better.

By: Danny Sullivan

Danny Sullivan — Fri, 08 May 2009 15:42:44 +0000

@weblivz pointed out Valebrity to me today, which tries to verify accounts in different ways, such as whether a person with a known site links back to their Twitter account.