Afraid of becoming like "AOL dial-up or a Borders bookstore," Netflix announced that it needs to change to keep up with the times. That evolution consists of Netflix ripping itself in two, with Netflix becoming a stream-only company and its newly-born brother Qwikster taking over the responsibility of mailing DVDs out to people. Timothy Lee explains why he thinks this is a bad idea for Netflix at the bargaining table. At the very least, it may not have been a very well-executed announcement. P.R. 101: Buy the url/domain name for your new product. P.R. 201: Nail down the Facebook page and the Twitter handle for it.
Twitter flunked P.R. 201. It hasn't started a Facebook page for Qwikster yet (though Netflix has a thriving one). And, as TechCrunch notes, the Qwikster Twitter account is already taken -- by a "Jason Castillo" whose icon is a red Elmo smoking a blunt. Not the greatest logo for the new company; Netflix can't be tickled by that. One of Qwikster's most recent updates, from June, conveys the overall tone of the account: "Bored as shyt wanna blaze but at the same time I don't ugh f** it where's the bowl at spark me up lls."
Redgrlsays quipped, "@Qwikster is out of every DVD except Half Baked and all the Cheech and Chong films."
Hey Netflix, better be qwik to get control of that account.
Update: The man behind the Qwikster account is looking to cash in. While selling a Twitter username is technically against site rules, he can probably find a way to work something out.
I asked Twitter about how it handles users who want to sell their accounts. Spokesperson Carolyn Penner says: "Beyond [posted Twitter rules], we don't comment on specific accounts, for privacy reasons, and it's not productive to get into a theoretical discussion."
