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Ha! Nothing beats writing an article on a fire I started myself

As I was browsing through the latest Bright Magazine 28 (July 2009), I noticed their colophon mentioned names of employees (Medewerkers Uitgelicht), email addresses, several web sites, phone numbers, inter-corporate relationships, yes, even a fax number fax number, but no Twitter account! It puzzled me. It’s 2009.

So I did some research. I’ve known for a long time that Bright’s name on Twitter is @BrightSite, which surprised me earlier (the name BrightSite refers to a web site, while an innovative organisation such as Bright obviously has the potential of conquering more media than just the web), and I concluded that the obvious first choice, @Bright, must have already been taken. I investigated this matter and it checks out. @Bright is owned by somebody who opened the account on Twitter, wrote his initial opening tweet on March 7th 2007 and took a sabbatical. He’s probably enjoying a nice cocktail on a small island with a name I can’t pronounce. But nothing has happened with (t)his @Bright account ever since and that’s a pity…

Curious, stubborn and helpful as I am, I couldn’t resist sending Bright a tweet on this matter. The nice thing about Social Networking is that it allows you to link just about anything to everything (TV, print, web whatever the future may have in store for us), so I wanted to know what’s up with Bright and Twitter. Maybe Bright’s presence on Twitter was still “experimental”, which is the case in many organisations . Experimental is a kind of fuzzy status, which is somewhere in between “not present on Twitter” and “present on Twitter with full confidence”. Sometimes there is a Twitter account, but without tweets, which makes you wonder if the company you had in mind is actually the company whose Twitter account you’re viewing. A good example is @WallMart.

My preferable way of informaing Bright was doing it quiet and sneaky, comme it faut, but Twitter only allows you to send a Direct Message (private message) to someone who’s following you (who is a follower of yours) and Bright and I don’t have that kind of relationship. I didn’t see any other way than to send my tweet into the Twitterverse (the wide world) and to sit and wait. I could have traditionally done this by email, but I was afraid of ending up in somebody’s drawer, waiting for monday to happen and besides: we’re talking Twitter here, so I thought: “If they take Twitter seriously, they just can’t but notice my tweet”. I did my homework and discovered that Twitter accounts @BrightTV, @BrightMag and @BrightMagazine were still unused. But for how long? I decided to write a consecutive tweet (sorry, I did this in dutch).

Right. There are organisations sáying the’re interested in innovation, but in reality they don’t seem to *really* care. I was pleasantly surprised that Bright had responded to me, even before I could say Twitterverse! The Twitter accounts @BrightTV (beautiful, even if I say so myself!) and @BrightMagazine are now taken. Nicely dressed with cool logos and, of course, Protected, meaning that the owner has to approve you following him first. I suspect low tweet activity, but the account names have been claimed. By Protecting your Twitter account nobody else can use the names and Bright doesn’t have to do anything with them yet. Showing your empty tweetless account to the Twitterverse isn’t that appealing

Haha. I can imagine what happened. Someone sees something on Twitter and starts calling/mailing/texting/faxing somebody else. The whole Emergency Contact Protocol 2009 unfolds itself and eventually reaches the The Big Boss himself. Somebody is woken up during the weekend: “Is that Farmer’s Son from Schagen right about this? It has to be taken care of NOW and it should have been already. What are we paying you for, anyway?!?”

Which brings me to the following: Should there be a law on squatting for empty Twitter accounts? Due to the ongoing lack of housing in The Netherlands we have a law (as long as we have politicians who care) that describes exactly under which circumstances a building may be taken, if it’s empty and its owner abandons it. How long do you think a Twitter account may be inactive, without actually being used? Will we see Twitter account hijackers, claiming your name, so you have to buy it back from them in exchange for a lot of money, like we saw (and see) with domain names? Should Twitter seize its Protected accounts, so we can see what’s going on?

#ThumbsUp Bright! You’re doing the right thing and next year I’ll ask my company to buy me another subscription on your fantastic magazine for my birthday