TweetValue: Will Selling Your Twitter Account Help You Survive the Recession?

Louis Gray has just published a review of yet another Twitter tool named TweetValue intended to assign value to any Twitter account - this time the value expressed in real money. We have already seen applications calculating all types of ranks for us but TweetValue goes one step further and encourages us to know how much our Twitter accounts are really worth.

To find out the value, you simply let the application know your Twitter ID and it will calculate its dollar value based on some secret algorithm using publicly-available information about your Twitter account.

In addition to simply calculating the value of one’s Twitter account, TweetValue will also offer you badges to brag about how expensive your Twitter account is on your blog. Besides, the website also features a constantly updated feed of recently evaluated accounts for everyone to see.

Of course any service that measures Twitter accounts and assigns some rank or value to them, TweetValue also features a list of top accounts - those that happen to be the most expensive ones. And if you hoped you would be able to make millions off your Twitter presence you will probably have to think twice as the most expensive account belongs to Chris Brogan and is $8,145 worth -which is obviously not bad but definitely not all that amazing given the time people like Chris devote to building their presence on Twitter. (UPDATE: Ken Sheppardson has played with the tool and found a few accounts that are more expensive. The most expensive one is BarackObama with a value of $41,150 - now that is a good price already.)

But the obvious question is what real value you can find in this amount your account is supposed to be worth unless you can actually sell it. And I really doubt we will soon see a marketplace for Twitter accounts any time soon for prospective buyers to be able to buy my account and use it as they like in the future. Besides, will the value of Chris Brogan’s account remain the same if his account without Chris Brogan handling the account himself?

So as usually, with TweetValue we have yet another application evaluating our virtual value without providing any real value. Unfortunately, knowing that your Twitter account is worth a few hundred bucks will hardly help you pay the bills if you are laid off - unless someone actually wants to buy it for the amount calculated by this application.