The feature is now live and a few accounts are already sporting the verified badge

Jun 12, 2009 07:28 GMT  ·  By

Twitter announced the launching of Verified Accounts earlier this week, in a blog post by Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone, and now the feature is already available. Some very well known people already have the 'Verified Accounts' badge showing up on their Twitter profile, and more are on the way.

“With this feature, you can easily see which accounts we know are 'real' and authentic. That means we've been in contact with the person or entity the account is representing and verified that it is approved. (This does not mean we have verified who, exactly, is writing the tweets.), ” the Twitter page explaining the feature reads.

Until now, only a handful of accounts have been verified, like Ashton Kutcher's @aplusk or Oprah Winfrey's @OPrah and other high-profile celebrities, journalists, and the likes, but Twitter hopes to expand the numbers in the following months.

“We’re starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion. (For example, well-known artists, athletes, actors, public officials, and public agencies). We may verify more accounts in the future, but because of the cost and time required, we’re only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses, we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months,” Twitter says.

What is a little strange is that some accounts, while sporting the 'Verified Account' badge, haven't actually been verified with anyone, for example TechCrunch's Michael Arrington. Of course, some of them are, obviously, not fake and Twitter didn't really have to confirm with anyone, but it still is a little odd.

The move to add Verified Accounts comes after several cases of impersonators and a recent lawsuit, which have spurred Twitter to add the feature in hopes of fixing the problem. Anyone facing the issue can contact Twitter to have their account verified, but don't get you hopes up if you don't at least have a huge number of followers. Also, Twitter isn't releasing the feature for businesses yet, but it may, in the future.