A new site called TweetStalk is in private beta. It allows you to “follow” Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it (Twitter tells you when someone new has subscribed to your data). It’s all through a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey or otherwise. You are then able to follow the person without them knowing, and the service provides a RSS feed as well.
This isn’t as bad as it sounds. Twitter pages are public by default so all the content is there for everyone to see anyway. Twitter should probably just implement a private follow feature of some sort to allow this anyway. But until they do, you’ve got TweetStalk.
Update: Nashville, TN based Sitening checked in to say they’re the ones behind the service. Find out more about them on Crunchbase.
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wow..This is something that I was looking for! But this can be done manually as well…using the Profile RSS feed.
Just got to get the bloke I fancy to use twitter then!
“Twitter should probably just implement a private follow feature of some sort to allow this anyway” - Are you kidding? How can an expert like you say something like this in the era of socialness and openness?
era of what?
You just couln’t have missed that the web _is_ going social
OMG it’s Domokun!!!
I think this is a moral gray area. but since you implicitly commit to zero-intimacy by subscribing to Twitter… I don’t know…
the data is public.
I don’t have a problem with people following me in this way. But it does invalidate some data one might get in valuing tweets. If you don’t know how many people are following you and who they are, you can’t post info that’s as relevant to them as a group.
this is pretty much how crowdstatus.com used to work before we starting down the gnip road.
I use both RSS and cut-out twitter accounts to follow people I want to “monitor from the bushes”.
By stalking I am assuming this means I follow that person but I dont appear on their “following” list of people. I also assume that their following number doesn’t increase.
this could be an interesting tool for competitive intelligence or research. especially as more and more businesses and enterprise level companies are starting to leverage social media and twitter especially for ‘alerts’ to their customers.
excuse me. i mean i don’t appear on the ‘followers’ list.
I don’t know why this made techcrunch, surely anyone could just subscribe to the RSS or visit the person’s twitter page, use FriendFeed’s imaginary friend feature or do this in my site, FriendBinder.
By the way, the invitation code is “Sitening”. Feel free to spread it around.
- Kate O’Neill
Managing Director, Sitening
(a.k.a. the “mad computer scientists” behind TweetStalk)
@richard (and all actualy), yeah right: use a feed reader to get updates and you’re done … i don’t see the breakthrough there …
You can stalk anyone you want without their knowing today via twitter — just create a stalker account….
destroys the MAIN metric for monetization - which is accurate follower data and the ability to model the followers to see where the hubs exist within the larger network…that is why twitter does not offer this tool, seeing followers promotes the follow action
Sorry, but I still don’t get why this is useful. Just follow people normally and forget about it.
whats next twittermurder?
twittermurder is something i’ll subscribe to.
Oh btw
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Can it be used to follow jokers that use the Block feature like there’s no tomorrow?
This is good. This defeats neuralgics and tetchy anal-retentives like Dave Winer, Shel Israel, TechCrunch *cough* and Robert Scoble who block you from following them on Twitter, so that their comments can’t show up on your stream.
They do this to prevent you from exercising your freedom of expression to comment on their Twitters.
But of course it’s retarded, because you can just look them up on Tweetscan and follow what they say anyway, plus some people make accounts to follow them anyway before they can block those people, and you then follow those re-tweets.
They then want to be able to block your mention of their name, or comment on their Twitter, from their stream, so they never have to think about your critique.
The vanity echo-chamber of Silicon Valley.