Following several high-profile examples of ‘fake’ celebrities on Twitter – culminating in a lawsuit from baseball manager Tony La Russa this month – Twitter has launched a ”Verified Accounts” program in beta, which will post a badge on celebrity accounts that have been verified.How will the process work? It’ll apparently rely on the celebrities’ official websites linking to their Twitter accounts. The program will also apply for sports stars, public officials and public agencies. The idea is that it’s immediately clear if a Twitter account truly belongs to who it claims to be.What about artists and celebs who want to charge fans to read their tweets? A new service called Super Chirp makes it happen, tying into people’s existing Twitter accounts, but letting fans sign up to paid-for premium tweets delivered by direct message.TechCrunch reports that users of the service can opt to charge between $0.99 and $9.99 a month for their feeds, with Super Chirp keeping 30% of the revenues. No, there’s no pay-per-tweet option yet (followers of Stephen Fry can breathe a sign of relief). We can’t think of a single artist whose tweets we’d pay to receive in this way, but Super Chirp could be used for more useful non-musical services too, such as stock tips.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…