Meet the Writer Being Sued for His 17,000 Twitter Followers

At any conference, product launch or other event where the top tier of tech reporters gather, Noah Kravitz is easy to pick out of a crowd. He's the affable guy with glasses, earring and a cue-ball head; a supersmart cellphone-loving thirtysomething with a finely tuned sense of the absurd.

Online, Kravitz often goes by the handle "Kravy Krav," an homage to hip-hop legend Flavor Flav. KravyKrav was also the name of his very first (and now inactive) Twitter account. And if that had been the only Twitter name Kravitz ever went by, he wouldn't have made news this week.

But his subsequent Twitter account was @Phonedog_Noah, and that has led to an eyebrow-raising lawsuit from his former employer. The reviews website Phonedog claims Kravitz's Twitter account, now renamed simply @NoahKravitz, is the equivalent of a corporate customer list that the writer upped and left with. The site wants $2.50 for each of Kravitz's 17,000 Twitter followers over an eight-month period, which adds up to $340,000.

"I would do it differently now," Kravitz told Mashable this week, "but at the time, calling the account Phonedog Noah made all the sense in the world. That's where all my online efforts were going, and I was all about 'let's make this thing as big as we can.'"

"Not to blow my own horn, but I was Phonedog Noah for many years," he added. "People would recognize me [from the popular YouTube videos that Kravitz filmed for the site] and call me Phonedog."

At the time the account was established, Kravitz was the site's only editorial person, if not an actual staffer — a freelance editor-in-chief, as he puts it. "We weren't equipped to have policy on this stuff," Kravitz says. "It was all brand new. The lines were blurred."

Phonedog President Tom Klein demurs, saying the site had a social media policy in place from the start. "When creating the account, PhoneDog management permitted and directed Noah to establish the account using the PhoneDog_Noah naming convention," Klein wrote in an email. "PhoneDog is a personality-driven brand, and we realized that expanding Twitter, YouTube, and other social media mediums would allow us to better engage with our fans."

When he and Phonedog parted ways in October 2010, it was on amicable terms, Kravitz says. He contacted Twitter to change the name on his account. A dummy account was set up under the name Phonedog_Noah, so that no one else could grab it. And Kravitz agreed to tweet occasionally on Phonedog's behalf. (He now works as editor-at-large for the website Technobuffalo, which just posted a lengthy defense of his position.)

Indeed, emails obtained by Mashable show Phonedog staffers asking Kravitz to send out tweets about promotions long after his departure, and Kravitz agreeing to do so.

Things only soured after Kravitz filed suit for back pay he says he was owed, plus a percentage of Phonedog's ad revenue he was allegedly promised. Phonedog actually filed its countersuit over the Twitter followers back in July; it's making waves this week after the New York Times noticed it and published a story on Christmas Day.

The suit, if it goes to trial, could establish a number of precedents in the online world. "This seems to be the first case of someone legally trying to put a valuation on a follower," notes Kravitz. And that valuation, $2.50, is significantly higher than you might expect — given that you can buy Twitter followers on eBay for less than a penny each.

Still, Phonedog's attempt to put a value on Twitter followers could well backfire. No one particularly cares to hear that they're worth $2.50, even if that is well above the going rate. The site's Facebook wall is already filling up with comments to that effect. "I just unfollowed you guys on Twitter," writes one commenter. "You can put my $2.50 directly in my PayPal account."

Meantime, Kravitz is in good spirits. He's settling in for a long legal battle, but taking time to enjoy the absurdity of his situation — especially the fact that his often random personal tweets, which dominated his feed before and after the association with Phonedog, are now being analyzed by the world at large.

"I like the whimsy of it," he says. "All this hullabaloo over a guy who tweets about what the bathroom smells like, and posts pictures of himself in front of unicorn paintings."