An Internet company has sued one of its former employees, saying the worker cost the company thousands of dollars in lost business when he took 17,000 Twitter followers with him when he left the firm.

PhoneDog LLC filed a lawsuit in July against Noah Kravitz, a writer who worked for the Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, company from 2006 until last year. Attorneys for the Web site, which reviews mobile devices such as phones and tablets, said Kravitz owes them $340,000.

The company said when Kravitz resigned, he changed his Twitter name from PhoneDog_Noah to noahkravitz, and kept his 17,000 followers. The company said the followers should be treated like a customer list, and therefore PhoneDog’s property.

PhoneDog said Kravitz should pay $2.50 per follower per month for eight months, or a total of $340,000.

Steve O’Donnell, a patent and intellectual property attorney, said he hadn’t heard of a similar case. He doubted that each follower is worth the USD 2.50.

“On Twitter, if you hang out long enough, you’ll get hundreds of follows from people who are just gathering accounts and broadcasting their own content people who aren’t necessarily paying attention to anything PhoneDog has to say,” said O’Donnell, who practices law in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

“Twitter followers can come and go. ... It’s very transient. It’s going to be hard for them to put a dollar number on something that’s so ethereal.”

Kravitz, who now lives in Oakland, California, eventually went to work for a competitor website and now boasts nearly 24,000 Twitter followers.

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