The northlondonhippy

Archive for March 2nd, 2009

Hav­ing a some­what point­lessly devi­ous mind means you occa­sion­ally spot things that are meant to be used one way, but can just as eas­ily be exploited to be used another way.

Every user account on Twit­ter offers you the chance to receive the tweets it gen­er­ates via an RSS feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, click right here.

If you have either your browser or a news­reader app con­fig­ured to deal with RSS feeds, all you need to do is click on the RSS link and its mag­i­cally added to your sub­scrip­tions list.

The link on Twit­ter pro­files is easy to find, its just below the thumb­nail pho­tos of the peo­ple being followed:

Once you’ve added the link to your RSS reader, every time you refresh it, you will receive the tweets from the selected feeds, assum­ing they’ve sent any­thing since the last time you updated.

All that’s fair enough, but what if you wanted to fol­low some­one with­out them know­ing you’re fol­low­ing them. Per­haps an ex-partner, maybe even your cur­rent one or your boss or your best friend or your worst enemy, whoever?

You can use this method to accom­plish just that, stalk­ing with stealth on Twitter.

If you fol­low someone’s tweets via your RSS reader, you won’t appear in their fol­low­ers list. You won’t appear any­where and only you will know you’re receiv­ing them.

Sneaky and cool, eh?

Now, I know there are peo­ple out there who might use this rel­a­tively sim­ple tech­nique for nefar­i­ous pur­poses, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Right?