TechCrunch today announced that Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron is selling his Twitter account on ebay.
As expected, a debate has been sparked around whether this is even allowed and more importantly, what effect will this have on Twitter. Currently the account has reached $510 on ebay and with 9 days to go I’m sure it will go for a few thousand dollars. I don’t know too much about Andrew Baron but I suspect he is doing this to raise a point and get some traffic along the way (he has done both!).
Will this backfire on him? I don’t think I’d be too happy with someone if they asked me to follow them and then proceeded to sell their account. At the very least I would be reluctant to take part in or support and future ventures from the person.
An interesting discussion has started on Chris Brogan’s blog, check it out if you have time.
Chris Brogan’s View on the subject : Is Your Community For Sale
[...] I responded to Shawn Collin’s post last night and stated that ‘this kind of thing isnt good for twitter’. I didn’t really expand too much on this statement at the time but those who have read this blog in the last month will know that I’m not a fan of gaming or manipulating social media as the medium gets ruined when people try to exploit the site for their own benefit. That being said, I don’t have any major problems with those who do, I just don’t want to be part of it (some might say that if I’m not part of the solution I’m part of the problem but I prefer to look at it that I’m leading by example!! ). However, do I have the right to assume that Jim is using TwitterMeThis for self promotion or is his sole aim of this project to experiment with this new social media. I’m a regular reader of Jim’s blog and he has come up with some innovative methods of getting traffic so my initial thoughts when I read about this project was that he was using it to drive traffic to his blog. Maybe that is partly his plan here but at the very least he has stimulated some good discussions through this (it’s not like he’s selling his account!). [...]