James Siminoff

Daryn’s take on my “Twitter’s Biggest Asset” post

Great comment by Darren on my post today about Twitter. In fact I think he did a better job writing a comment then I did on the original post.

There has already been a landrush for twitter names to some extent, so the only viable way for twitter to implement this is to start doing it with new registrations, then start reclaiming idle names.

I’d hate to see them start kicking people off of their actively used names, but I’d propose something like grandfathering in everyone for a year, then starting to charge a nominal annual fee for any name (perhaps with tiered pricing for individuals v. businesses).

There’s a lot of precedence and pricing variation in the domain industry to base this off of. I’m sure it would be controversial in the short term, but could make a lot of sense.

That said, I’m sure Mr. Grider would consider an aftermarket sale of @grid to you, for less than a year of your proposed pricing (although i’m not sure if that is technically within twitter’s ToS or not).

The biggest question in my book though is whether the twitter namespace really has a continuing value. Is there a point where domain names (or facebook id’s, or something else) are the correct namespace for online presence, and I’m always @daryn.net or @daryn.daryn.net instead of just @daryn everywhere?

Originally posted as a comment by daryn on James Siminoff using Disqus.