A case for paying Twitter

An interesting post by Sheamus at Twittercism about verified accounts on Twitter got me to thinking about how that could be the one reason why I’d be willing to pay a yearly fee to Twitter.

It sure isn’t for their web interface because that sucks. The only time I leave the comfort of my current client is to check out a Twitter profile before following them – or not. Seeing that Verified checkmark icon on an account is a re-assurance.

What could be greatly influenced by verified Twitter accounts is other service sign-ups. A growing number of services already let you to use your Twitter credentials to log onto their sites. This number could grow if web services knew that the people signing up had already been verified.

The question is how do those verifications happen for use regular folk?

As Sheamus pointed out – it is one thing to verify someone like Bill Gates (@billgates) who was almost instantly verified – but what about you and me – the regular smucks on the street?

I’m not sure how that would happen or if it really something that Twitter even wants to think about given the administrative headaches lying in wait. There is one other concern I would have before even seriously considering handing over my cash.

Well two – security and uptime. Granted the uptime has become less of a problem but it is still lurking in the shadows. Security on the other hand is of major concern at the best of times but throw in the verified accounts and it’s a whole different ball of wax.

My worry is that Twitter isn’t; like the majority of Web 2.0 social media services, secure. It has been hacked in the past and the occurrence of hack attempts would only increase if Twitter verifications became a value item. My confidence in Twitter to be able to deal with those attempts isn’t the highest.

That said if Twitter came out with an easy way for me to verify my account and Twitter account sign-ins became more common I could see it being worth my money to pay Twitter for that verification process.