rickmans's posterous

Both in Twitter and Friendfeed (and probably an awful lot of other applications) there is a design flaw regarding users protecting their updates. As you might know you can only read updates of users that protect their updates after they gave you permission for it.

However if you do not protect you updates (and give it a thought, why would you want to protect your updates, or are you talking about homeland security? Then you should not use these tools at all), the users that protect their updates are free to add you to follow you. However if you want to follow them back, you have to do a request...