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Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

grimtweeper.com

31–38 of 38 posts

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#31
I like this - a lot.

Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow.

Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better.

I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#32
post #31

I like this - a lot. Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow. Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better. I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

Hey so there are two reasons we actually opted not to do this:

1) The Twitter TOS does sort of prohibit this. We know this empirically because some apps that have done this before have been cut-off by Twitter.

2) It would not be scalable to users with huge numbers of friends and also it would take a much longer time to load and sort.

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#33
Neat application - keep up the good work. A couple points of improvement are 1) after being redirected to the site, I couldn't really go back to where I came from (HN, in this case), 2) not to be overtly meticulous but I was wondering why the buttons are pushed around 2px down on hover (tested in Firefox 4 on OSX 10.6), and 3) the comfy AJAX-y feel could be there if the box was a static size beforehand, when latency increases client side, the kill/keep buttons are really in a funny position. Overall this is definitely something to use again - cleaning up lists on Twitter seems to be egregious (and I'd imagine without the API rate limiting it'd be more than 1 person/screen :-P).

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#34
post #15
post #2

Useful tool. Some advice: It seems the order of user is random, I hope there're some better algorithms to present the potential users I may want to kill. The activities of user, times of one user have been killed may count.

Indeed. I can manually remove people (sure, it isn't as fun) but you have a real opportunity to add value here. The criteria I look at when I do one of my periodic follower purges: * Do I know them personally? * Do I follow them back? * Have they tweeted recently? * Are their tweets content-laden or link spam? * (Where you can add value: Do other people unfollow this person frequently?)

1) I would actually love to know what you think would be a good metric for 'do I know them personally'. I believe this would be a big deal for us. We attempted to sort of do this in an earlier iteration by getting your latest @mentions and counting how many times the user @mentioned you and what the mentions were. However the problem was either an extra API call per a person to get the last 200 (the limit by Twitter) or make 1 call and only look through 50. We decided either way wouldn't be worth it.

2) We actually do show if they follow you back, but I guess we need to make it more clear.

3) We also have a recent tweets/day as well as recent tweets. Again I guess we need to figure out how to emphasize this better.

4) This is actually good, how would you go about doing this?

5) Very smart idea, we will start tracking this in our DB. I think.

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#35
post #33

Neat application - keep up the good work. A couple points of improvement are 1) after being redirected to the site, I couldn't really go back to where I came from (HN, in this case), 2) not to be overtly meticulous but I was wondering why the buttons are pushed around 2px down on hover (tested in Firefox 4 on OSX 10.6), and 3) the comfy AJAX-y feel could be there if the box was a static size beforehand, when latency…

Good calls! I think we are going to try to clean up a bit tonight and implement some of those suggestions. And for sure. The Twitter Rate limit (350 calls/hr/person) is something always on our mind.

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#36
post #31

I like this - a lot. Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow. Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better. I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

Hey so there are two reasons we actually opted not to do this: 1) The Twitter TOS does sort of prohibit this. We know this empirically because some apps that have done this before have been cut-off by Twitter. 2) It would not be scalable to users with huge numbers of friends and also it would take a much longer time to load and sort.

Hmm... yeah, after about a half hour clicking the buttons, I don't think that I'll use your app more then once.

It really is a nice way to cull my followers. I'm trying really hard to keep my Twitter account topical and interesting. However, spending the time to go through each and every user more then once doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

Re: Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists

#37
post #31

I like this - a lot. Please give me the option to see a long list containing all of the people that I follow. Showing me the users follow to followers ratio as a percentage would be useful data. If I could sort the long list based on this number, it would be even better. I'm not sure about the current Twitter TOS, but having the option to bulk unfollow with a checkbox would make things fast and friendly.

The follow to followers ratio was something we definitely considered and will hopefully be able to put into a future version! We think it's a cool stat, but we didn't want to clutter the page with numbers and make it overbearing.
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