Interesting article over at Mashable.com, discussing the online charity auction for the Twitter account name “Drew” (Name only followers are not included, he has over 7,200 of them by the way)
The auction is being held for the benefit of and all money from the sale will go directly to the LIVESTRONG foundation.
The seller is Drew Olanoff, who was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma and who has a site at blamedrewscancer.com
Interesting enough, the auction according to Mashable is with Twitter’s blessing
The a minimum bid is $10,000.
The auction starts now, and will take place on Twitter using the merit system. Anyone can place their bid on the @drew Twitter name using the #drewbid hashtag. Bidders have until 12am EST on November 9, 2009 to make an offer, at which time Olanoff will award the highest bidder with his Twitter name.
Are Twitter IDs the new Domains?
I’d rather pay for $10 k for a virtual asset like this than pay over $25,000 to eat dinner with Sarah Palin.(Google it if you don’t know). This is really interesting news that Twitter is allowing the sale of this user name. Sure this is for a good cause but I believe the brains behind Twitter want to gauge interest for such names. Part of their future business model may be to sell premium names such as twitter.com/sky. According to their rules, they can forfeit any accounts that haven’t been used in over a year. Many premium names sit unused.
UPDATE
Drew Carey has now bid $25K for this Twitter Account name:
http://mashable.com/2009/10/03/drew-carey-bid/