I agree that someone buying the Twitter account could get value from it by analyzing the conversations that have happened, the @s and the DMs. There is definitely information that would be useful to an advertiser.

To me, that feels like it would be a breach of the social contract. There are only 2 things that Twitter doesn’t make publicly available, your DMs and your Followers. (With the obvious exception of protecting your account.) You can data-mine the tweets, searching for keywords and @s to specific people. There’s a rich source of information that can already be gleaned from Twitter.

Chris Brogan (besides starting this interesting debate) wrote his eBook on the Trust Economy. If selling any kind of social networking account becomes a trend, I think we are going to see the currency of trust rise in value. Right now it’s easy for people to make connections, often with people they don’t know. This can be a good source of discovery for people looking to network. But, if the default assumption becomes that people are looking to build large networks so they can ‘monetize’ them by selling the account, then making connections with people is going to diminish.

This may be a symptom of the walled-garden networks that exist today and will disappear if social networking becomes like air.
Or it may have the effect of killing off conversational spaces like Twitter. That would be very disappointing.

But they would be better off to pay him twice as much to build a network for them.. that disclosed who was who and what was what.

I think it will go over about as well as selling your job. When we get a tweet from a different person than we expect, we’ll just unfollow (fire) them and be done with it.

This is all about whether you can sell your reputation with others on the open market for a “profit”. But I think you’ll find that some things, like trust and reputation, can’t be measured well in currency (although it is measured in opportunities that come your way every day).

If someone has become so jaded as to assume trust and reputation can be commidified, perhaps social media is no longer a good place for them to be hanging out. And I don’t mean this in a snide way, but sincerely- if someone is only looking to collect and sell their social contacts to others, the value in those relationships- the strength of the chemical bonds, so to speak, must be pretty low. Or it will be, shortly, once the commodity relationships begin to fracture.

Excellent post, especially like that you have an inside perspective on the buying and selling of “people.”

First, you bring up an excellent point comparing the usefulness of Twitter information to a standard contact database. Right now the auction is at $255 which is already more than 10% of that $1.50-a-head number you mentioned. The auction is a 10-dayer so I imagine he’ll get much more than where it currently sits. The bidders really should take into account that the information they are getting is useful only in the Twitter environment.

Sure, Twitter is huge right now and it could end up being incredibly lucrative for the right buyer, but it sure is a lot more risky than finding someone in your niche who has a large email list and “renting” their list for an email or two. And that method generally brings much more targeted traffic to your site if you choose wisely.

Second, your concise writing was very effective. By the time I got to “You are for sale” I was seriously creeped out. Just the way you framed the article and your word choice really made it clear how often and easily our personal information is thrown about.

Thanks for a great read!

Sara

P.S. I follow you on Twitter, that’s how I found this post. I’m sarach