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Comment by shazow | Hacker News Reader

I love the tone of your writing (both in the post and on TweetingMachine), it's modest yet confident.

Some feedback:

* [Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)] I couldn't find the pricing after the 10 day trial anywhere. This frustrated me and made me not want to try it at all without knowing what I was getting into.

* Twitter frowns upon auto-follow/unfollow services. You should be very careful with this. I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Great work, I look forward to the second part!

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> I recently had to make changes to my own service because the Twitter API policy team didn't like me telling people who unfollowed them.

Just curious: which section of the Twitter API ToS do you read as restricting notifying them of people that unfollowed them? I know that the API policy explicitly prohibits automated unfollowing and restricts automated following, but haven't ever seen anything that addresses notifications of a someone unfollowing another user.

They referenced Section II.4.B, namely since native Twitter apps don't "organically display" unfollows, you should not as well.

> Respect the features and functionality embedded with or included in Twitter Content or the Twitter API. Do not attempt to interfere with, intercept, disrupt, filter, or disable any features of the Twitter API or Twitter service, and you should only surface actions that are organically displayed on Twitter.

Ah, that does seem to follow from the quoted section. Thanks for referencing it, I appreciate it.

It's a big bummer as a potential Twitter-hacker, too. I can see why they wouldn't want clients & add-ons to surface unfollows, but it blankets quite a bit of functionality, and then it comes down to an issue of selective enforcement. Sigh.

You're welcome.

The way I read it is "don't do things we don't already do" which is a really bad constraint, effectively forbidding any kind of innovation. I can understand the spirit of their selective desire to address this specific violation, but I'm not convinced it's as much of a problem as they're making it to be.

Oh well.

[Edit: Looks like it's right there in the center and I'm just blind. :)]

I couldn't find the pricing either, so I think it is hiding in plain sight.

Totally agree. I thought it wasn't listed anywhere until I looked at the comments here. It would probably improve conversions a lot if there was a simple "Pricing" tab at the top.

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