Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists | Hacker News Reader

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

grimtweeper.com

40 pointswesleyzhao33 comments

Seems like all it does is iterate through my Twitter followers and ask me if I want to unfollow each one. I was a little disappointed, I was hoping it would tell me which ones never post anything or something slightly more useful.

http://tweepsect.com/ might be what you need. I built it a few years ago, it tells you who is following you back, and if they haven't tweeted recently, etc.

Unfortunately it doesn't scale well to really huge accounts (+5k nodes).

Thanks for your thoughts we'll definitely work to add more value, but for now it will tell you how many tweets per day the tweep has and tell you whether they are following you back.

And who does nothing but tweet about "social media". Just when i think I've got rid of them another one pops up....

I see a button to sign in with Twitter, but nothing to tell me what--if anything--you will do with any data you obtain from Twitter or from observing my activities using your application. I suggest you put your privacy policy right on the front page. If it's privacy-positive, I'd brag about it, e.g. "We'll never share your data with 419 scammers."

Good points. We are privacy positive, so we'll figure out a good way to convey that. Thanks!

Also, why does every app request permission to write to my Twitter stream, even if it has no business doing that? You're supposed to only read my stream, no?

because twitter doesn't granulate permissions like facebook does.

Of course it does, just pass "oauth_access_type=read" when calling /oauth/authorize...

Posted here, as nobody seems to know about this:

http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-acc...

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.

agreed. I need something that tells me how often I interact with fellow tweeters...and based off that, keep/remove.

my 0.02

Thanks for the advice! Right now we're just grabbing the data from Twitter and presenting it without sorting it by any kind of algorithm, but we'll definitely think about how to present the people you're most likely to "kill" first, that's a good suggestion.

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?)

Great issues. Stuff we'll look into. Thanks!

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.

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).

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.

You might want to handle this exception. http://d.pr/UZOm It sucks that Twitter's 'Over capacity' responses are being sent in HTML, rather than as an API response.

Thanks for letting us know! I just added a line of code that should catch that exception and return a better response.

We had caught other exceptions and thought we were good, but glad you showed us one more! Thanks.

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.

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.

Admittedly, I didn't log in and actually try your site but from the looks of the landing page, why couldn't I just march down my timeline and essentially do the same thing? Where's the added value? Also, I can't see ever paying to use this. Sorry if I sound harsh...

Thanks for your feedback. We felt like the value added features are the convenience that the app affords e.g no scrolling, and the decision to follow or unfollow is done with just one click. We also provide information to help you make your decision such as the average tweets per day that the person makes. As for money this is mostly just for fun to build something that people might find useful and cool :)

I like it. Couple of nit-picky points.

1) The instructions are too small and placed wrong. Shouldn't it be shown above the login button? I do like that it's a clear 1,2,3 though.

2) No way to log out (that I could find anyway).

Interesting, we'll definitely look at improving the landing page. Good point on the logout button that will be added shortly.

cool, now a tool to clean up my followers would be awesome. i believe 75percent of my followers are just parasitic twitter accounts. a way to get rid of them would be awesome

That's what I thought this was :(. I wasn't aware that people had the opposite problem!

Something else for us to look into then!

damn, got rate limited just as I was picking up steam in chopping off heads

Haha that's awesome! Sorry that the rate limit occurred. We tried our best to make calls as efficient as possible so you could make as many double/triple kills before the Grim Tweeper got tired.

First Twitter link at the bottom, is misspelt,

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