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.

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.

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.