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