Over the weekend Biz Stone announced that Twitter will be testing out a new verified accounts system this summer.

The experiment will begin with public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes, and other well known individuals at risk of impersonation. We hope to verify more accounts in the future but due to the resources required, verification will begin only with a small set.

This development was no doubt in part because of the lawsuit that St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa delivered on Twitters doorstep because someone was impersonating him.

Impersonation violates Twitter’s Terms of Service and we take the issue seriously. We suspend, delete, or transfer control of accounts known to be impersonation. When alerted, we took action in this regard on behalf of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa.

Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.

I was a little pissed off by start of this statement in which Biz stressed that they take the issue seriously and suspend, delete or or transfer control of accounts known to be impersonation. I have contacted Twitter a few times about people hijacking the Twitter usernames of domains/websites I own and they have never replied once.

I have seen a few other bloggers being pissed off about the fact that well known celebrities get their account back within a few days yet they won’t even bother looking into this kind of thing for your average joe. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they must get a lot of complaints about hijacked accounts but they have to take some of the blame because hijacking is so damn easy to do on Twitter.

But, similar to Google, Twitter seem to respond incredibly quick when a big name or company complains about something. But the rest of us are not so lucky. Just recently Tyler Cruz had to choose @TylerCruzDotCom as his Twitter username because @TylerCruz was hijacked and Twitter did nothing about it.

I do think that Verified Accounts are a great addition to Twitter. However, for the majority of users, it won’t stop anyone hijacking your name. Twitter have said as much by stating that they are dealing with celebrities, athletes and public figures first.

Link : Not Playing Ball

I came across an article the other day on Harvard Business in which they discussed the results of their recent Twitter research.

For the project they took a samle of over 300,000 accounts. They found a lot of interesting stats about including :

• Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women
• We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman
• The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets
• Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one (Apparently yhis translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days)

I recommend reading the article in full from the link below

Link : New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

After being the first person to reach 1 million Twitter followers 6 weeks ago, Ashton Kutcher seems to have reached another milestone by being the first person to reach 2 million Twitter followers.

It’s crazy to think that in just 6 weeks he managed to add one million followers. It wouldn’t be surprised if he had 5 million by the end of the year. The CNN breaking news Twitter account @cnnbrk has dropped down to 3rd place with 1.6 million followers, being overtaken by Ellen DeGeneres, which kind of surprised me.

Ashton Kutcher is very active on Twitter and interacts with his followers, the CNN account is popular because…well because CNN is popular but I the rise of the @TheEllenShow puzzles me a little. I know Ellen is very popular on the US but she doesn’t appear to reply to any followers so I can’t understand her meteroic rise.

Though by comparing their follower count over the last 3 months, it’s not out of the blue. It appears that she has wasn’t mentioned much in the news rush in April about breaking 1 million followers.

Do you think Ashton will be the first person to reach the 3 million mark?