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Earlier this fall, a judge ruled that a lawsuit filed by PhoneDog.com against one of its long-departed employees, Noah Kravitz, has merit. According to Eric Goldman's Technology and Marketing Law Blog, the company is suing Kravitz over three points, including trade secrets and misappropriation of the account. The ruling, reported by Goldman and the New York Times, states that Kravitz is liable for several hundred thousand dollars in damages, calculated at $2.50 per month per Twitter follower.

This isn't the first conflict over who owns your Twitter account, and it certainly won't be the last. When Rick Sanchez left CNN he kept his account but changed the name. This is what Kravitz did when he left PhoneDog.

Over 40% of a brand's Facebook page fans "unlike" the page as soon as a campaign ends, suggesting that a lot of follower activity on the social network is driven by agency interaction, not a real loyalty to the brand, according to a new study.

The study by DDB reveals that two in five brand followers surveyed are not interested in engaging with Facebook pages after a marketing engagement ends.

I know you don't do this, but you probably know someone who does: obsesses about their Twitter follower count. Or Feedburner subscriber count. Or LinkedIn contact count.

And yeah, the raw number's interesting for about three or four seconds. But it says nothing about how you engage with those people (assuming they're people, and not bots - which can be a big assumption), or how they engage with you.

Twitter is testing a new feature tonight that will provide users with a widget in the profile sidebar which displays mutual follows. According to a status posted by Twitter developer Nick Kallen, 10% of users now see a "You both follow" section on user profiles that will showcase a handful of users that are followed by both that profile and the user visiting it. So if user A follows B, and user C follows B, then B will show up in this section when user A visits user C's profile.

I had some free time this weekend, so instead of going to party, I decided to look into Google Buzz. It's not every day that a major social site is launched. I wanted to find a way to find my friends quickly, and gain many followers. I started by looking into popular users and finding friends we have in common. It was pretty tedious, but I noticed I could add as many people as I wanted. So I built a script that would auto-follow everyone in someone's list. The idea was people would see that I was following them, and some of them would follow back.

It worked much better than I expected! I've grown from 25 followers to more than 2,700 in three days. This places me in the top 10 most followed Google Buzz users, ahead of Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Google VP Bradley Horowitz, Orli Yakuel and Adam Hirsch.

It's no secret that getting on Twitter's suggested user list will quickly drive a user's follower numbers up, but thanks to O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, we can now actually quantify this boost. Lorica, with the help of tools like Twitterholic and Twittercount, examined data from about 80 users who made it onto the suggested user list. On average, these users gained around 53,000 new followers after being on the suggested user list for a week. After 30 days, these users had gained almost 200,000 new followers on average.