A new Twitter account appeared on Friday March 7th. “SecondLife Official” (@SLOfficialtweet) billed itself as the “new Second Life official twitter page”. This took a number of people by surprise, given there is a legitimate Second Life Official Twitter account (@SecondLife).

The appearance of the account prompted a question on its legitimacy from Strawberry Singh (among others), which in turn prompted an immediate and unequivocal response from Linden Lab:

Peter Grey, the Lab’s Director of Global Communications further underlined the unofficial nature of the account in an e-mail to me, stating:

That account is NOT official, nor from Linden Lab. It was first brought to our attention this morning, and we’ve been replying to queries on Twitter about it to confirm it’s not legit.

The account doesn’t appear to be a phishing attempt – the link included in the account header seems to refer to the official secondlife.com website. However, as it stands, it is likely that this account could be blocked / removed by Twitter as it would appear to be a pretty clear attempt at brand impersonation and trademark misuse.

Parody accounts, unaffiliated accounts, etc., are not new on Twitter. However, many of these do carry an indication that they are not in any way official. Twitter also have an account verification process for those accounts that might be subject to impersonation in order to further help prevent issues of misrepresentation. Given the extent to which the Lab uses Twitter, having their own official account verified might help discourage this particular prank from being repeated in future.