In December 2011 PhoenDog LLC filed a lawsuit against company blogger and Smartphone reviewer Noah Kravitz after he changed the company’s Twitter page to his old name, essentially stealing the websites Twitter followers after leaving the organization. On Wednesday U.S. Magistrate Judge Maria-Elena James said she will allow the case against him to move forward.

In filing a lawsuit against Noah PhoneDog LLC claims he owes them $340,000, the equivalent of $2.50 per follower.

If you’re unfamiliar with the case Kravitz started the Twitter account @Phonedog_Noah while working for several years at PhoneDog, when he left the company in October 2010 he changed the handle to @noahkravitz and kept the 17,000 followers he had amassed during his time at PhoneDog.

Speaking about the courts decision Kravitz’s lawyer Cary Kletter said: read more

InstaBG is a simple to use program that allows users to pull in various Instagram photos to create awesome Twitter backgrounds for their personal accounts. By simply giving the program access to your Twitter profile you can not only create a nice background but have it auto-updated with fresh picture content each day.

I personally find that InstaBG is great for photographers who want to showcase their most recent digitally stored photographs with very little effort.

To get started you’ll first visit InstaBG.com where you will be greeted with the following display: read more

These days it’s easy to give dozens, even hundreds of developers access to your social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc…). Those developers typically use that data to post information with your permission, pull your feeds for use on other accounts and for various other reasons.

While most developer uses won’t hurt your social media standing it’s still a good idea to manage those accounts. For that specific purpose the MyPermissions program was created.

The program was created by Avi Charkham when he became frustrated having to search eight different app pages for his numerous social media accounts.  read more

Twitter users were hit with a 90 minute outage on Saturday morning (New Year’s Eve 2011) that appeared to affect most, if not all of the company’s user base.

Shortly after recovering and allowing access the site them briefly went down a second time with a graphic claiming the site was “over capacity” something that might have occurred when millions of Tweeters began accessing their accounts and sending out Tweets that the site was back up.

After a while of ups and down the site once again began normal operation.

Most accounts place the outage from 10 a.m. ET to approximately 11:20 a.m. ET. read more

Twitter on Friday received a long awaited brand endorsement when athletic apparel and equipment maker Nike finally joined the social network with the account @Nike.

At the time of this post Nike has managed to amass 19,395 followers during the accounts first day in existence.

Almost immediately following the Twitter accounts release major athletes began following the brand including Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong and Steve Nash among others.

The move to Twitter shows Nike’s dominance over the market after the company managed to rack up more followers than Adidas in less than a 24 hour period. read more

Instagram has become a photo sharing sensation, allowing users to organize their photos and share them across a vast mobile network, now thanks to the website InstaBG.com users can share their own photos and the photos of other publicly available albums with a simple and sleek interface that auto updates daily and offers plenty of customization.

The program couldn’t possibly be any easier to use, once a user clicks on “Sign in with Twitter Account” they are asked to verify their Twitter credentials and approve the application for use.

Next a screen displays that shows users a list of options they can choose from: read more

If there’s one thing that will come out of the Occupy Wall Street it’s a new movement towards social media protesting and to serve that purpose organizers of the Occupy Wall Street movement are building a social network that focuses specifically on protests.

Speaking to Wired developer Ed Knutson said:

“We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists.”

The idea stems from a November issue of RoarMag in which it’s stated:

“In addition to the local squares, we now need a global square where people of all nations can come together as equals to participate in the coordination of collective actions and the formulation of common goals and aspirations. For this reason, we call upon the revolutionary whizkids of the world to unite and assist in the development of a new online platform – The Global Square – that combines the communicative functions of the existing social networks with the political functions of the assemblies to provide crucial new tools for the development of our global movement.”

Visitors to the website will find plenty of helpful tools including an interactive map of protests around the world, a search option to find movements in your area, a Facebook type news feed, debate forums, a space for collaboration efforts, messaging and more. Basically the site will act like Facebook without the games (perhaps an OWS game?). read more

Twitter on Tuesday released a collection of Twitter stories that are meant to show the “humanity behind Tweets that make the world smaller.”

Located at stories.twitter.com there are currently nearly 20 short vignettes that range from 100 to 150 words on average and showcase what users can do with just a few snippets of 140-character postings.

Among the top stories is Roger Ebert who used the service after he lost his voice, while another person received a kidney after tweeting “sh*t, I need a kidney.”

In another story a man tweeted and saved his mom’s bookstore from closing down forever. read more

Social media is now the main tool for the vast majority of charities and good causes for getting their message out, raising awareness and funds. All of the top 200 Forbes listed charities use at least one of the main social media platforms for their fund raising campaigns.

Tweetathon, Tweetsgiving and Twestival have all used the social media tool Twitter with great success for their charity drives.

read more

It has been a busy week in the world of social media as employees jump ship, Blackberry finally receives an assist from Facebook and Klout made big changes to their algorithm which they promise will make determining a persons Klout more accurate.

Here are a few of this weeks top social media stories in case you missed them.

1. Finally, Facebook Messenger Available For BlackBerry With Great New Features 

After a very long wait users of Blackberry devices can now pick up an official Facebook messenger application. Among the programs best features are the “who’s online” real-time option which also shows when a friend is typing, support for 12 languages and location based sharing. Facebook Messenger for Blackberry devices also features push notifications and plenty of other bells and whistles.  read more