Lawyers say Twitter will likely weather legal challenges from an Israel-based group that tries to combat terrorism through litigation, which is claiming the San Francisco-based company is violating U.S. law by allowing groups like Hezbollah and al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab to use its microblogging service.
In a letter sent to Twitter last week, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, director of the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center, threatened legal action and said Twitter and its officers could also face criminal charges if the accounts in question are not taken down.
Matt Graves, a spokesperson for Twitter, declined comment.
The outcome of a lawsuit in which a company is suing a former employee over Twitter followers will most likely hinge on how the list was developed and what value each side places on the followers, according to legal experts.
"This case is another example of the application of relatively old legal rules applied to new technology," said Bill Nolan, an attorney with Barnes & Thornburg LLP. "It's the 2011 version of the salesperson taking the Rolodex when he/she leaves the company."
PhoneDog cleared the first hurdle in the lawsuit earlier last month when a court rejected Noah Kravitz's request to dismiss the lawsuit. PhoneDog is seeking $340,000 from Kravitz, or about $2.50 for each Twitter user that started following the account @Phonedog_Noah while he was tweeting and writing for the online publication. When ravitz left the company in October 2010 he changed the account's handle to @noahkravitz and retained the more than 17,000 followers he had amassed while working for PhoneDog.
There were reports of widespread outages of Twitter's main Web site Saturday, with speculation centering on the problems stemming from a flood of New Year's greetings.
We asked Twitter for comment and will update as soon as we hear back. "Our engineers have identified the issue and Twitter is now almost fully recovered," Twitter spokesperson Carolyn Penner said in an email at 4:30 p.m. ET Saturday.
By 2:50 p.m. ET, MSNBC was reporting that the site was "slowly coming back online" and there seemed to be few problems with accessing the site and posting messages by 4:15 p.m. ET. The only official indication from Twitter that something was amiss came Saturday morning, when the company posted "Users may currently be experiencing some site issues; our engineers are working on resolving this issue" on its status microblog.
If the site goes down again -- particularly as you hope to send out your New Year's tweets as the calendar turns in your part of the world -- try using an app or the mobile site. Some users reported success posting messages using clients like HootSuite, TweetCaster and Twitter's own TweetDeck during the earlier outage.
Twitter appears to have forwarded a subpoena requesting user information to at least one of the owners of the accounts in question, despite a request from the Suffolk Massachusetts District Attorney's office that the request not be disclosed "to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the ongoing criminal action" regarding the hackitivist group Anonymous and events surrounding the Occupy Boston protest.
"Haha. Boston PD submitted to Twitter for my information. Lololol? For what? Posting info pulled from public domains? #comeatmebro," said the owner of the Twitter handle @p0isAn0N last week, in a post that included the subpoena. The subpoena also sought user information, including IP addresses for @OccupBoston, Guido Fawkes (there are more than 30 accounts using the name Guido Fawkes on Twitter) and subscriber information for the hash tage #BostonPD.
Sweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant
Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.
The takeaway from an MIT study released Wednesday, tracking the early growth of Twitter, is that new Web technologies - particularly social networks that rely on adoption by other users - cannot depend solely on online buzz (or even Ashton Kutcher, for that matter).
The study tracked data from 2006 to 2009 in the 408 U.S. cities with the highest rates of Twitter adoption. The findings clearly demonstrate that mainstream media mentions, coupled with the geographic and socioeconomic proximity of users, fueled its growth. A video mapping the data shows initial growth in San Francisco, where Twitter is based, then spreading to Boston.
A Swedish charity is claiming a first after setting up a paywall on Twitter in which people pay to read Tweets from some of the country's celebrities.
Author Susanna Alakoski, pop singer Niklas Strömstedt, music journalist Fredrik Strage, director and actor Felix Tobias Herngren and television host Gry Forssell are among 15 noted Swedes who have spent the past week Tweeting for Stockholms Stadsmission, a charity that focuses on homelessness in the Swedish capital. More than 500 people have forked over the equivalent of $4 U.S. to follow the celebrities in the fundraiser, which ends Wednesday.
The New York Times is reporting that U.S. officials are considering legal actions to shut down the Twitter account of the Shabab militant group of Somalia.
Noted for its brutality, the Islamic group is considered a terrorist organization by the U.S. The group has been using its Twitter account to taunt the Kenyan military, which was dispatched to Somalia in October to combat the Shabab.
Any such move to pressure Twitter to close the account, however, would pit free speech concerns against anti-terrorism efforts. "I was kind of shocked by the statement that story was making - I honestly thought it was a joke when I first saw it," said Joshua King, general counsel at Avvo.com. "There's really no legal authority they can use in this instance."
The $300 million secondary investment Twitter confirmed Monday morning comes from a key figure in a region where Twitter is experiencing some of its fastest growth.
Never mind that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the Saudi investor whose Kingdom Holding investment firm has stakes in Apple, Citigroup, and now, 3% ownership of Twitter, isn't a big user of the service himself (Prince Alwaleed follows just 25 users with his account - including Fox News and Barack Obama - and he hasn't tweeted since Oct. 6 when he sent out RIP condolences to Steve Jobs).
Arabic is the fastest growing language used on Twitter and the company has gotten credit for playing a role in the Arab Spring uprisings in Northern Africa and the Middle East earlier this year, and that makes Prince Alwaleed's investment significant.
A new study-turned-infographic from Mr Youth suggests that social media interactions influence consumer purchasing tendencies. The data was collected during the three-week period of time leading up to, and including, Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Yet despite glowing percentages about social media users - 65% of users recommendations led to a purchase, and recommendations by social media users were twice as likely to lead to holiday gift purchases - brands apparently are not responding to consumers on social media sites.
