How do you know that a Twitter account represents the person or organisation that they say they are? Just a thought, and this might sound complicated, but I think this could be an easy, workable solution.
- In the Twitter account you provide a Web link.
- On that related Website you include some metadata or a specific page (a bit like the way browsers detect RSS or other embedded microformats) that includes the Twitter account ID.
- People can then add little authentication routines into their Twitter apps that check if the Website listed confirms ownership of the Twitter account back.
Obviously it wouldn’t have to be mandatory (I mean, we still want Twitter to be fun!).
What do you think - could this work?
Alternatively, a great business model for Twitter could be to offer premium accounts that are “validated” by Twitter as authentic.
Tags: twitter, trust, online identity
I like it a lot, kind of like the OpenID chained trust idea. Simple, neat and achievable in 10 minutes.
ReplyDeleteGood to get one vote of support at least :-) Now I just need to find someone who can create a proof of concept for us!
ReplyDeleteIt's hard enough to get Celebs and their web teams to post a link on their site much less a Meta Tag. Great idea, but looks like we'll have to stick with people like @realtweeps and have them do the manual verification for us.
ReplyDeleteA more focused effort is something like TweetMP http://tweetmp.org.au/, however its not integrated with Twitter itself.
ReplyDelete