There are a lot of applications that require the level of protection and security to assure users of the level of accesibility to their personal data. However, the one that I don’t understand blocking is Twitter. Afterall, you can block people that you don’t want to follow you, but is your twistream so personal that you need to block it from everyone except those you have allowed to follow you?
The only reason I can think of to block updates from appearing publicly (in search) is to test a developing product that uses Twitter. You maybe don’t want all the tweets to end up public right away because you have a monetary or proprietary reason to do so.
Maybe its my lack of caring (or my internal TMI critic) about what I put out on social sites. I’ve had my Facebook profile open to whomever since I first signed up: except for address/phone/email (duh). The difference is that I can understand the reason behind protecting yourself from certain people on a site that can contain a large amount of information.
Is it because you complain about your job and you want to make sure that your boss isn’t watching your twitter stream without following you? From what I could tell, up until about a week ago, you could search for tweets by people with protected updates and get their streams anyways. This has been fixed now (and therefore this blog post re-written).
I just want to know why. For all I care you can put ‘anonymous’ as your name. If you pass my CAPTCHA you’re comment will get posted. Tell me why you protect, or think that someone would protect their updates on Twitter.
–dez
