Selling Relationships: Would You Sell Your Twitter or Facebook Account?

Posted on April 15, 2008
Filed Under WTF, work |

If you do any amount of business online you know that web 2.0 is where it’s at. Instead of impersonal transactions between buyers and sellers we’ve replaced that with a kinder, gentler method. Now we add each other to “buddy lists”, get in each other’s Facebooks and tweet to one another on an hourly basis. The whole thing is just so darn—civilized. That’s to say, it was until someone found a way to crap all over yet another good idea.

So here’s my question to you: How would you feel if your online friends sold you at auction?

While it may seem like I’ve been sniffing the old Elmer’s glue again I sit before you in a state of shock as I try to wrap my brain around the fact that some guy is actually selling his Twitter friends on eBay.

Andrew Baron has put up his Twitter buddies and any personal information they may have shared with him over the course of their relationship and selling it at a whopping profit to the highest bidder. Wow, man, where’s the web 2.0 love?

I know most of us are on the internet to make money—and God knows I’m one of them—but am I the only one that thinks this is about 10 feet across the “cheesy bastard” line?

Now I do realize that not everyone on my Twitter account is a close and personal friend (uh—sorry) but they are either people I “know” from other online communities, or they have a blog I like to read or they started following me and I thought “what the hell?” and reciprocated. No matter the reasons I started following it sure wasn’t with the intentions of selling their virtual asses at auction.

To me this is just another way to encourage short cuts and a cheapening of something on the internet that is supposed to be good. There was SEO that was supposed to separate the good websites from the cheesy ones—then black hatters ruined that. There was supposed to be proper email marketing and email newsletters—and spammy bastards buggered that up. There were supposed to be backlinks from one website to another as a “vote” for your site to encourage quality—then people started buying and selling links. Then web 2.0 came around and the beauty of it was you couldn’t hide behind your parlor tricks anymore—you had to actually interact with people and earn their trust, respect and friendship before you earned any money. Now that’s for chumps and you can just buy the relationships of others.

And if it starts with Twitter does that mean Facebook is next? There’s quite a bit of information stored in Facebook profiles. Would you be comfortable if one of your friends sold all that information to a complete stranger just to make a buck?

I know we’re all looking for the most efficient way to make a living online but I think there comes a time when we, as online business people, have to draw a line in the sand. Web 2.0 was supposed to be about reaching out and making online relationships and I, for one, don’t think relationships can or should be bought or sold—at any price.

Like a train wreck—you just can’t help but look. Here’s the eBay Twitter Auction.

So what do you think? Are you comfortable with the buying and selling of Twitter accounts and other web 2.0 lists?

Comments

One Response to “Selling Relationships: Would You Sell Your Twitter or Facebook Account?”

  1. Technology Slice (1 comments.) on April 21st, 2008 6:51 am

    I wouldn’t sell my facebook account to anybody.

    Technology Slice’s last blog post..Lose Weight Fast - Accellerated Diet

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