Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter. | Hacker News Reader

Do You Follow Too Many People On Twitter? Use ManageTwitter.

techcrunch.com

13 pointszemaj20 comments

I saw this a few days ago, tried it out, and found it pretty useless. (I follow ~100 people).

Unfollowing someone because they don't follow you is stupid. In fact, many of the most insightful tweets I see come from accounts that don't follow me, mostly people who are to some degree high profile (@wycats (Merb/now Rails guy), @defunkt (GitHub founder), etc.)

If someone's talkative, it's pretty obvious, and I'll either get annoyed by their tweet volume and unfollow them after a time of dense tweets, or they're not bothering me so it's fine.

Quiet and inactive are a horrible reasons to unfollow someone, since if they're quiet the cost of following them is basically 0.

I absolutely agree. This tool doesn't help you increase your signal to noise ratio, which should be the real goal.

That's why I recently built this: http://www.unladenfollow.com/ Unladen Follow suggests people to unfollow based on how noisy they are, not whether they follow you back. It gives you metrics about things like excessive hashtags, links, and so on.

"This is equivalent to following Robert Scoble 21 times."

Thank you, this made me laugh out loud..

I love this tool. A couple points of feedback. I don't mind @mentions if they're sent to people I'm not following since I don't see them. Also, it would be nice if you included the table headers every 50 rows because I can't remember what each column is once they're out of view. Great tool though!

Hey John, sorry I missed this comment when you first posted it. @mentions are not counted if they are @replies for the reason you suggest. The repetition of table headers is a good idea, though, thanks!

That's really, really awesome.

One idea, add .@ detection. If they ever use .@'s, I'd automatically give them a score of infinity. (Not really, but it sure is annoying and would be a cool thing to factor in)

I considered that - right now they're just penalized as normal @mentions. I'm not sure if

". @steve Going to the grocery store now!"

is much worse than

"Going to the grocery store now, @steve!"

I've also considered extra-penalizing manual "RT @steve", but will wait until all the main clients support it (Tweetie for Mac, for example.)

I think it becomes most useful if you have an auto-follow back on your account and 200+ following. It starts to become difficult to get much utility from your twitter stream at that point.

I'm interested - what metrics would you want for choosing who to unfollow?

If they say things that interest you keep following, if they spam/post crap unfollow them?

Maybe I have just got completely the wrong idea about this follow/unfollow lark though.

I think it's dishonest/useless to follow people if you're not genuinely interested in things they say.

I despise the "follow them if they're following you" mentality. It's identical to having 10k "friends" on Facebook / MySpace. If they don't enrich your life, are they really worth following? Is it just more noise?

It's one of the reasons I tend to like Twitter. I only get info I request, nothing gets pushed to me that I'm not interested in (a la FB's feed). I follow who I want because I want, and I don't want them to follow me if they're only interested in their following count.

Yeah it's kind of like that whole "if you're not following 1000+ people you're not a real Twitter user" article that made the rounds a while back. Maybe if you just want another way to kill time and procrastinate at work (as if we don't have enough already) you should follow thousands of people on Twitter, but if you're actually trying to get some real value out of it then it's insane to follow that many people—unless you're a professional blogger, which is where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Twitter hype comes from.

Nice little app, I love the humorous and clever "status" updates as it connects to your account.

Some of the metrics I'd like to see would be to highlight my best followers. Would be nice to know who replies to me, and who retweets my stuff. Also would be nice to change the threshold for what is considered a quiet/talkative user.

Assuming I had hundreds of people I follow, knowing the top 10/20/50 that actually connect with me (via DM/reply/RT) would be a nice way of trimming the 'fat'.

A bot detector would be nice as well. Maybe some logic to tell if someone you follow is using an "auto" tweet app or is tweeting the same thing over and over.

1) Spend a week building this app 2) Get an article on TechCrunch 3) Profit! :)

Went through quite a few iterations on the design. Feedback/improvements are certainly welcome.

Did you make this all by yourself? I like the design. It definitely seems like the best tool for this kind of thing.

Yeah, I did (with the help here and there from a few people where I work). Glad you like it. Took a stock image for the background built a simple design and focused on making it usable. Everyone I speak to with 300+ following seems to have an issue managing people they follow. Decided to do something about it.

http://friendorfollow.com/ is also pretty good for this kind of thing.

> ManageTwitter requires Google Chrome Frame to run in Internet Explorer! Please install it from the box below.

Wow, are we really going to live through another round of "Best Viewed in Netscape Navigator" wars?

No, because it doesn't require Chrome. It requires a modern browser. Firefox works. Chrome and Chromium work. Safari works. Opera works. Epiphany works. Konqueror probably works.

IE, as a platform, simply hasn't maintained parity with the state of the web. It doesn't make sense for a small team to hobble their product or expend undue effort for the sake of one laggard.

And hey, you don't even have to give up IE! Drop in one plugin and everything works, transparently.

It was a tough choice - make the thing run in IE, or spend more time improving the UI for everyone else. In the end I went with the later. I figured most of our audience wouldn't be using IE, and if they were, they probably had Chrome Frame installed. If you're one of the unlucky few who can't run Chrome Frame for whatever reason, sorry!

Great app - I think unfollowing people is the secret to improving Twitter!

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