Twitter Account + Followers For Sale On eBay
Rocketboom producer Andrew Baron has created possibly a first by putting his Twitter account up for sale on eBay. Barons explanation for the sale: I really love my Twitter account but I feel like I haven’t been using it the way I want to. Quite... 7 months ago
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If that isn't an open invitation for a wave of twitter spam bots, I don't know what is.
The way I look at it is this, he is betraying his followers. I don't mean that in a nasty way, I just mean that if you think of a follower as a media subscriber it's not the thing you would generally do. Granted the followers have the option of "un"following another user but they chose to follow the orignal account holder for a reason of probable personal interest rather than the name of the account. This doesn't sway my opinion of Andrew Baron either way because I think he did it out of interest to see what would happen. But if someone planned to generate a large follower base and then try to sell it off just for profit.... then I would think differently. In any case I think it's an interesting marketing experiment to test the value of a social network's userbase.
I agree with kapheroph. I also see that this case demonstrates that the Twitter team needs to start taking a more active approach to handling spam and future account creators and sellers, which will surely generate after Andrew Baron's recent experiment, I guarantee it.