Now that Twitter is rising out of the pits of being a private company and into the paraside of the big IPO (they're about to make gobs and gobs of money), they decided to celebrate by introducing a new feature for their users. Well, not all of their users, just the nice, popular, verified ones.
Now, if you happen to be so lucky to have been granted verified-status by the Twitter gods, you'll have three options in your Connect feed: firstly, the classic "All" option that shows all of your @ mentions; secondly, you'll have a new "Filtered" option that knocks out tweets that are likely spam; and lastly, "Verified," the new option that weeds out all of the non-verified users and only shows you the important people, like yourself, that have the fancy blue checkmark by their names.
Twitter's goal for the new "Verified" filter option is to make it easier for other verified users to talk to each other—bad news if you're a non-verified user, though, because this makes it that much more unlikely that your favorite celebrity will ever see your tweet to them. But it doesn't matter: like any "elite" class, the members want to associate with each other, and not with the little people, in this case, non-verified users. Being verified is the newest form of exclusivity, the blue marker that means you're popular, you're liked, and you're followed. It's the thing social media companies like Facebook were built upon. With Twitter, the verified are at least 50,000 members strong—out of a total of 500 million users. Welcome to the digital bourgeoisie.
[via Engadget]
