The man at the center of the high profile  “who owns your Twitter followers’ legal row has seen an astonishing outpouring of support from around the world in the past 24 hours.

Noah Kravitz, 38, is being sued for $340,000 by his former employers, PhoneDog.com who say the 17,000-strong Twitter following he had amassed when he quit the company belonged to them.

Being sued for $340,000…TecnhoBuffalo’s Noah Kravitz.

The TechnoBuffalo executive says he left his former employment on good terms in October 2010 with the express understanding that his Twitter followers belonged to him.

Now it appears that Kravitz has found an ally in another former senior member of PhoneDog who has come forward to back the popular technology journalist.

Kravitz has posted a screengrab, ironically on Twitter, which he has titled:  “Ex-PhoneDog worker speaks up regarding company’s Twitter lawsuit against @noahkravitz.”

The image appears to be from a FaceBook post from John Ashton Edgar who says he was Community Manager and Internal Promotions Manager for PhoneDog Media.

The text of the message says:

“I have discussed this with Noah Kravitz and talked about how unfair they [PhoneDog] are being.

“…there was an expectation that the editors self-promote their wares but that their Twitter accounts were their own…”

As news of the controversial lawsuit spread around the world one immediate impact of the story was that Noah saw a huge spike in his Twitter followers.

In just 24 hours he added more than 1,400 followers and his numbers of followers continue to surge as people from all walks of life want to show their support for Kravitz.

Also a new FaceBook fan page was set up called Social Media Followers are not property- Support Noah where people wanted to make public their support for the technology journalist and it had received 142 likes within just hours of going live.

The page showed links to news stories about Noah, messages of support, clips of him on TV speaking about what it felt to be at the center of the row and other relevant articles.

Since the story broke Noah has been in demand to appear on TV and radio shows to talk about the lawsuit.

He told CNN that when he worked for PhoneDog the company did not have any formal Twitter policy and said when he left nobody from the company had asked him to hand over the account or its password.

In fact Kravitz said the company were happy to publish his final review which included a link to his renamed Twitter account.

He said: “This whole claim about Twitter came entirely out of the blue.

“My Twitter followers are their own property and I love all of them.”

Noah Lravitz on CNN

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