I have requested to be verified by Twitter over a year ago and have had people tell Twitter to do this on my behalf. But it was to no avail. So I had to laugh when Facebook said it is going to verify users the way Twitter does.

My response was: "You mean, poorly?"

The whole complaint of mine was in full swing some time back when I walked into Leo Laporte's broadcasting studio as he was interviewing The New York Times' David Pogue who was ranting about something I said about him on Twitter.

The problem was, I had said nothing. This was from a fake John C. Dvorak. My Twitter moniker is @therealdvorak, period.

After his long rant, he was clued in (after I barged in to find out that this was some hoax played on him). The problem is: Twitter cannot and will not verify people like me who need actual verification. In fact, there are 20 John Dvoraks and at least five are fake versions of me. John N. Dvorak is obviously who he says he is and John Dvorak the writer from High Times doesn't even know who I am.

He should actually be verified too.

I put my failure to get verified as something as simple as this: Twitter hates me. Back in the in the late 1990's, I had a beef with one of the founders of Twitter, Evan Williams. I had been critical of blogging. At the time, Williams ran Blogger and eventually sold it to Google for gazillions of dollars.

What did I say that was so bad about blogging? I thought the whole blogging thing was doomed to be co-opted by corporations. I also ridiculed cat blogs which were apparently dear to his heart. He was very displeased. He then started Twitter and now I can pound salt if I ever want any consideration such as actual verification.

Nice guy.

I do not put it past any of these services to cut you off because they do not like what you say. All of them do it. It's yet another reason not to trust any online operation which relies on the cloud and operate on whims. Facebook users are commonly screwed over by that crowd. Yahoo! and others do this to various groups and individuals for all sorts of reasons.

The thing about this – and I include Facebook and the rest of these folks in this complaint – is that they become an unwilling public trust in and of themselves when they become critically important to society. They do not take this role seriously. The giveaway of public trust status for Twitter is when "tweet" becomes part of the dictionary in record time.

Because they are part of the public trust and important to commerce I think they should be investigated for corrupt practices. And I'm serious. At one point they boosted a series of individuals from 20-50,000 followers to 1.5 million for reasons that still elude me.

My unverified status is part of this problem. The fake John C. Dvorak (@johncdvorak) has not posted since August of 2007 when he got bored, evidently. He is there to mock my old "I get no spam" assertion. It's also a conduit for blatant age-ism as my Baby Boomer status was constantly ridiculed.

Ask yourself how this can continue? This @johncdvorak handle rightly belongs to me since he claims to be me. Does this help me get my verified status? No. Ask yourself why? Seems rather corrupt to me.

The only intention here is defamation.

The point is that those of us who need to use this service without worry that David Pogue will get bent over things that were never said is important. It should be a public trust. The cavalier way these companies treat users in inexcusable and unacceptable.

Yes, yes I've decided to make a fuss. Let's see if they verify me or toss me off the system for not pandering to them. It's ridiculous.