On Twitter, nobody knows you're a dog.
Like the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon which observed that the anonymity of the internet made it possible to pretend to be anyone, phony Twitter aliases abound.
But what happens when your business model depends on filtering access to thought-leaders who, for all we know, are really bored teenagers or pranksters with an agenda?
We may know soon. Twitter inched towards a first business model last week by throwing its support behind two ad-supported sites developed by Federated Media that display Twitter searches.
ExecTweets purports to aggregate tweets from corporate executives — about 100 so far, and on a page sponsored by Microsoft.
MarchTweetness, sponsored by
AT&T, pools together conversation and buzz about the NCAA
basketball tournament known as "March Madness" and makes no claims about the standing of the commenters. And there are many more to come.
But Twitter has yet to implement any sort of official verification process that gives a digital stamp of approval to big names like celebrities or CEOs.
Even Federated Media, which has to conduct its own vetting process, recognizes the problem.
“ExecTweets is built around specific people, so that could potentially be an issue in that situation,” said Matthew DiPietro, a spokesperson for Federated Media. “I can’t imagine it would be the case in this situation simply because it’s such a small group of people that were basically vetted just by watching their content.”
Just the other day the New York Times wrote that many of the celebrities who have Twitter feeds don't actually do any Tweeting themselves. But at least they own their identities even if they delegate the lifecasting updates to minions.
Some big names unofficially hijacked include the Dalai Lama, and Keith Olbermann (unbeknown to him via his own network MSNBC), and Twitter superstar Shaquille O’Neal finally put his foot down and started his own account after discovering that someone was pretending to be him.
Marc Ruxin, Chief Innovative Officer with MCCANN Worldgroup and the chief creative force behind ExecTweets for Microsoft, says around 25 of the initial seeded execs they either knew personally or contacted through their networks, and the rest were verified by looking back at previous tweets.
"It's not like we kind of arbitrarily threw 100 darts that had any sort of business dialogue," said Ruxin. "We do have a filter before anything goes live, and that's the other place where we're kind of insulating ourself from anything odd happening."
New additions and non-business tweets are curated with "a very high degree of certainty" that they are the real people, but he says he's all for an official verification process.
"Would it be good if Twitter had a service? Absolutely," said Ruxin.
Twitter’s terms of service prohibits impersonation and warns that such an account will be removed.
Twitter investor Todd Chaffe, General Partner at Institutional Venture Partners, brought up the idea of verified accounts as a potential business model. Contacting everyone directly would likely take a fair amount of time and resources, but would be beneficial to everyone once they are given the seal of approval.
“There may be an opportunity for Twitter to offer some sort of verification service for certain types of accounts,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told Wired.com. “It's definitely on our list of ways we can add value to users.”
Anyone can create an account using any name they choose, and it isn't likely to get terminated until the true person contacts Twitter and reports the abuse.
This could potentially be a big problem down the road if fake accounts are unknowingly used as real sources by the media without any verification, or more importantly if a fake CEO Tweets out information that could disrupt the stock market.
Biz Stone also confirmed last week with the Wall Street Journal that pro-accounts are on the way, so part of this initiative could very well include verification.
The Wall Street Journal article and reports a number of other aggregation projects in the works with Glam Media and Mashable. And there are also a bunch of individual, manually sorted lists by industry and directories like Twellowand Kevin Rose's crowd-sourced experiment WeFollow which have no warranties on the accuracy of the information.
DiPietro says they too have a lot in the pipeline for future sponsored projects with Twitter, but none he could provide any details on yet. And as Tweet aggregation becomes more popular with brands it only makes sense to have some sort of verification.
“We are in the very early stages of what is likely to be a long evolution of a channel which is the real-time web,” he said. “And all of this stuff is an experiment.”
