Well, for starters, it appears that anyone and everyone can see your tweets whether you engage in formal follow/follower requests or not.  One example is through Favotter, a Japanese (yes, it’s in English to) Twitter mashup service. And if you have Stweet (a mashup partnership between Google Street View and Twitter that came out in May 2009), anyone and everyone can see exactly where you are geographically (city, street and cross street), while you’re tweeting.

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? Well that depends on your perspective.  Let’s say a bank robber has his iphone with him as he’s about to do a job and his stwitterfon is enabled as he enters the bank for the holdup. He then tweets his accomplice. Theoretically they can be nabbed before the loot’s in the bag.  They can if the police (or anyone else for that matter) is monitoring their city’s stweet, at the time of the crime.

On the other hand, using your stweet app, any stranger can follow your twitter and you. Now that Google and Twitter have tied the knot, your stalker can track you down just by stweeting your tweet when your twitterphon’s on. 

What a field day ‘The twilight Zone’ could have had with this for a script!

About the Author: A leader in the search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing (SEM) arena since 1999, Martha Lee has more than 20 years of marketing experience in the software, online education, and e-commerce industries. In 2000, Lee founded the web-marketing firm, Get In Position, http://www.getinposition.com .