Who owns the Twitter followers of an account when they were amassed during an employee’s tenure at a company? A case popped up in the news today on SMH (originally published in the New York Times).
Twitter user sued by ex-employer for his followers (SMH).
The details are fairly clear cut:
- Employee tweets under Twitter handle that bears both his and the company’s name
- Employee amasses 17,000 followers in 4 years
- Employee leaves company and reaches agreement with employer to keep his account as long as he posts occasionally on their behalf
- Employee changes his Twitter account name to his own name and (not sure how) keeps his followers under his new handle
- Former employer then sues (8 months have passed at this time) claiming Twitter list as customer list. They claim that they have invested significant resources to grow the list and consider it their property.
For a while during my time at Daemon I could talk geeky with the best of them – well at least follow the conversations. Jason Barnes, Daemonite development manager was filling me in on what the team had been up to recently. This included their visit to cfObjective conference where Geoff (head Daemonite) gave a talk on Varnish. The slides are online (nice HTML 5 slide deck btw). I was like Varnish!? What the? No longer working with developers means I no longer get to learn geeky things through osmosis. A hello ping on IM resulted in my schooling in Varnish – a service that simply makes websites, like Facebook and Twitter serve content fast.
The panel at Digital Citizens: Ben Shepherd – Sound Alliance; Sam Buckingham – singer / songwriter; Gareth Stuckey – Director, Gigpiglet; Dan Rosen – ARIA Chief Executive Officer; Neil Ackland – Sound Alliance; moderated by@acatinatree. The event was held at FBI Social.
So the topic of the evening was meant to be Social media and the music industry but that’s not quite what we got.
Everyone talked about the revenue/rights quandary but there was no real talk of how they were strategising for the digital age. Except for Sam Buckingham, a singer songwriter who has leveraged social media to connect to her fan base, build a loyal following and even crowd sourced $11,000 via the Pozible platform to fund her first album.
Toby & Pete founders speaking at Apple Store Sydney for Australian Infront
What do you do with your eponymous moniker when your duo turns into a company? That was the predicament that Toby & Pete founders, Toby Pike and Piotr Stopniak found themselves in only 18 months after they started and the focus of their talk for the Apple/Australian Insight series. Toby & Pete are CGI artists who specialise in print media. They produce phantasmagorical images for the likes of Nike, AMP, SBS and Daily Juice.
Current outdoor campaign for Daily Juice Company features artwork by Toby & Pete. At bus stop on William St East Sydney
In 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People (New Riders Voices That Matter 2011) Susan Weinschenk, PH.D. quotes an interesting study that investigated if honesty varied according to the communication medium.
Charles Naquin (2010) from DePaul University … conducted research on honesty in people when using email versus pen and paper.
In one study, forty-eight graduate business students were each given $89 (imaginary money) to divide with their partner; they had to decide whether to tell their partner how much money was in the kitty, as well as how much of the money to share with their partner. One group communicated by email and the other group by a handwritten note. The group that wrote emails lied about the amount of money (92%) more than the group that was writing by hand (63%). The e-mail group was also less fair about sharing the money, and felt justified in not being honest or fair.
Marc Stickdorn is an academic and author of This is Service Design Thinking so we were more than lucky to have him address the group. Stickdorn teaches to both design and business students. A theme of the night was working and communicating across disciplines, with these two important requirements:
- That the design community, specifically the UX design community generate a shared language to represent and promote itself consistently
- That service designers learn the terminology of the other disciplines they are working with
Stickdorn quizzed us on product versus service, touchpoint versus channel, introduced us to service dominant logic and the experience economy but he really wanted to abandon the slide deck and just open up the conversation. Which he did. I think he actually found us to be a little shy as a bunch.
The group questions canvassed the following topics:
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