Twitter account for sale at $1,525
Evan William didn’t anticipated this I think.
Andrew Baron, founder of RocketBoom has put himself as the first man who sell his Twitter account on ebay. He did it only in a few days, started at April 12 with a bid reached $1,525 before he deleted it himself today.
Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CEO of HubSpot, a Web marketing service for small businesses was the highest bidder for this historical auction. He said that Baron’s Twitter account has some values for him. For example, he could use it to launch a nonprofit he’s working on. Or he could pair it with a new domain name and sell it as a marketing package for a new startup.
Is this possible? Technically and legally; it is! Dharmesh, if he really did it on that bid (unfortunately he couldn’t), could change Baron’s username without deleting all Baron’s followers which has reached 1,743 today. Now that’s the golden point. Twitter, Inc, the company itself doesn’t have such a term on their TOS relating to this case. So, what Andrew did is a legal thing though it is unethical for a couple of people in Chris Brogan’s blog.
In his crowded blog, Chris try to associate this case with issue on community. This is an acceptable reason for me since Twitter account or other social media platforms like blog (TechCrunch, Mashable, CopyBlogger) or social network (MySpace, Facebook) would be worthless without communities surrounding in it.
Finally, because Andrew had cancelled and even deleted this ridiculous auction himself, we could assume and conclude that doing such thing like this is an allowable one yet unethical, except if all members on the communities had agree too. Well, This is the hard stuff one.
About Twitter
The service that lets subscribers send quick notes (limited to 140 characters, or about 20 words) to the cell phones (the reason why this issue comes on 3GWeek) and Web sites of people who have decided to follow them.
Source: BusinessWeek, Chris Brogan’s Blog, and Andrew Baron’s Twiiter account
Image courtesy of Flickr and Wired Blog
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Print Posted by Wim Permana on April 16th, 2008
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2 responses
Good recap.
I’m not sure why folks think that Twitter accounts are that much different from personal blogs or other media properties. I don’t yet understand the argument of what makes this unethical. I can totally see someone making the argument that it’s foolish to pay that kind of money (given that all the readers can immediately leave), but unethical? I have not seen a compelling argument for that case yet.
-Dharmesh
Dharmesh Shah (April 16th, 2008 at 11:38 am)
For Mr Dharmesh Shah, thanks for coming and leave us a comment. By the way, I guess you’re shortly to become blog celebrity nowadays. Congratulation!
On ethical; people or individual of course has their own personal opinion about this. When some people said that X is ethic, others would said the opposite. Vice versa.
Back to your case, as a marketer, personally I can accept your reason. In fact, I guess you’re pretty genius too. But, when I try to become or pretending to be Evan William here, this auction probably is not what he (I) wanted from such service like Twitter. Imagine if this auction were really happened. People perhaps will start to faking them self and try to be somebody else famous or worth-to-buy. Though they’re not.
………………..
From this case, perhaps the next other Twitter-like startups will see this as a great chance to create a heavy weight and high quality content Twitter site. Just like the history of blogging, from something which people despite it (no price for it) into something that even NYT or CNET are afraid not to do so. The TechCrunch case. Yeah, nice angle Mr. Dharmesh.
Thanks.
Wim Permana (April 16th, 2008 at 2:31 pm)