How much is your Twitter account name worth (not your Twitter following or value of Twits) to you? As an individual, a personality/ celeb or a real brand? I recently took a drive through the oh-so-simple registration, and there’s still a lot of top level twits (TLTs?) available. Remember all of those domain names you couldn’t buy because domain squatters were holding them ransom? Well, my prediction is that the great land grab - this time around a kind of Twitfest Destiny - is back. The year of the Twitter squatters (”Twatters”) is upon us.

I recently went and got all of the Twitter accounts that I wasn’t able to get as .com names, plus I shored up my personal names and all of the 75 or so urls I currently have. I’m on Jason Calacanis’ email to 13k followers and he has @answers. One wonders if he was first to market, or he just contacted the squatter and paid for the top level position.

With 6M+ users, Twitter’s growth as the potential next Facebook can be staggering to think about. Evan William’s twitty Blogger successor is turning down $500M in Facebook stock and making Google re-examine micro-search in the greater search context. If Twitter is picked up (eventually) by a bigco, think Hotmail/Microsoft, MySpace/Fox, Youtube/Google, etc., the mainstream will attack the account name market in a big way.

From John Battelle’s “Twitter = Youtube” post:

What’s the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who’s the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own. (Remember, Google tried to build its own YouTube - Google Video - and it failed to get traction. A service like Twitter is community driven, and Google has never been really great at that part of the media business).

From Search Engine Guide:

The same holds true for your business. The last thing you want is someone out there twittering in your business’ name. Maybe they are a fan with good intentions, but maybe not. In either case, an “unauthorized” individual is out there actively engaging with the community in your name. They could be saying things that appear to be official company communications, but aren’t.

So, go get your Twitter accounts! Although I must warn you: www.twitter.com/signup is constantly down, hence the “fail whale” image above.

Good twittering…