twitter stalking.

it's scary how "social" the web has become. what's even more scary is how easy it is to stalk anyone in the world.

what's innocently published as blog, life-stream, tweet, or facebook status update is accessible to pretty much anyone if they really want it. basically, if you're twittering at work, your boss can follow you and see how you're using your time. imagine going to an annual review and they print out all the stuff you spent your time on non-work related stuff. they can actually quantify all of that now if they follow you. but you shouldn't have to worry because you spend your time doing more important things, yes?

there's a billion blog articles centralizing around the future twitter, facebook, and lifestreaming... but is this what we really should be doing with our time? it's nice to connect with people, but is online presence really that important? keep in mind, nothing will ever get deleted... so 10 years from now, someone could pull up your tweets, status updates, etc... and it could be used in ways you couldn't imagine.

but let's not talk about the future—there are plenty of articles about that. let's talk about today and how stalking has become effortless. yes, it's so easy to "follow" people now. in fact, my boss tells me, "build a better stalking tool, and you will have a better product than facebook/twitter". when you really think about it, he's absolutely right.

so how do you prevent people from stalking you? stop tweeting or updating your status... who really cares if i'm going out to eat, feeling tired, or taking a dump? i mean really, WHO REALLY CARES?

BUT if for some sick reason you really do care and you really want to stalk people, i recommend using tweetdeck. it's really easy to use... in fact it's insane how easily you can follow friends, enemies and strangers, all the time, all real-time. with that in mind, i'm seriously considering creating a fake identity for myself. and no, i won't be telling you my alias.

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