Selling your Twitter Followers
During RSA I was using Twitter at the request of the organizers of the blogger event. Outside conferences twitter seems to me to be the most monumental time sink I can imagine. I have turned it off on my work machines.
Twitter is essentially a variation on IRC or Jabber that can be forwarded over SMS. The cell phone thing seems to me to be a step too far. Each user has a log to which they post 'tweets' of up to 140 characters to. People can follow other people's twitter logs. A suprising number of logs consist of 'what is the purpose of twitter'. Its one of those zen things I suppose.
So now Andrew Baron is auctioning off his Twitter handle on Ebay, which has raised many blogger's eyebrows including Chris Brogan who asked whether someone is going to buy it. Brogan asks the wrong question of course, the bid price is already $1520 and it is arguably a lot more valuable than a Hail Mary cheese toastie. But what he is really pointing out is that his 1600 followers can melt away rather quickly.
At close to $1 per follower, the handle is certainly highly priced even by dotcom standards. There might be 1600 eyeballs but I can't imagine that many of them would stay long if there was an attempt to monetize them by spamming them with Viagra ads. And while 1600 followers is quite a lot on Twitter, it is hardly enough to bootstrap some other project.
