Script to get emails when someone unfollows you on twitter | Hacker News Reader

Script to get emails when someone unfollows you on twitter

gist.github.com

23 pointsandrewpbrett22 comments

It's not nice to care about people unfollowing you. Twitter is used by many as a stream of news, so it's a natural process that my interests shifts over time I want to unfollow people twitting about stuff that are no longer pertinent to what I'm doing right now.

Fair enough - but "nice" has nothing to do with it. If you're using Twitter, as many are, to get a message out, it's useful to know who no longer thinks your message is interesting, especially if you can pair it with a cause (a recent tweet that may have been offensive or a string of self-centered tweets, e.g.).

Like I said, I was just tinkering around and thought I'd share something I made that might be useful to someone.

" ... or a string of self-centered tweets,"

Isn't that sort of the essence of Twitter?

Don't like these kind of scripts. They are like "Yyz read your away message" or even worse "Xyz closed your message window" in ICQ and other messangers.

But nice code.

or even worse "Xyz closed your message window" in ICQ and other messangers.

Agreed about that, I've had (ex) coworkers give me grief about that, as if closing their message window was some form of devaluing their comments... when in reality I was just trying to make MY environment more manageable for getting my work done, unbelievable. I wish IMs wouldn't include such pointless notifications, I'm not even sure there is really any value to 'X is typing a response'.

It'd be a little easier to do this by requesting followers/ids (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-follow... ) if you have over 100 followers. That'll give you 5,000 id's at a shot and then you can just do a simple diff of id's.

Yes, you'd have to then request their profile info so {1:6, other:0.5*dozen}.

You can get an rss feed of unfollowers: http://rssfriends.com/only/unfollowers/yourusernamehere (eg http://rssfriends.com/only/unfollowers/oliverg) -- it's an undocumented url: and at first, setup this site to track your username by entering it on the homepage

http://useqwitter.com/

Same idea, with zero maintenance

It stopped working for me months ago. I don't know why.

maybe no one's stopped following you, you popular fellow, you!

http://twitdiff.appspot.com/ Same idea, and works fine.

TwitDiff guy here, the service delay graph is permanently broken. I hoover late accounts about once a day, usually only a few fall out of the system. It's actively maintained and generally fuss-free, except during Twitter API farts (including in the past, feeding the app completely invalid data).

Buzz me on Twitter if you have any issues. :)

David

Thanks! :-)

http://twitter.com/Goodbyebuddy is as simple as following a user, then you get DMs

Great, if enough people use this we'll see the emergence of unfollow spam.

Is there anything like this for facebook? I'd kill for that:)

If you're really concerned about people unfollowing you on Twitter, you're probably using it wrong.

Am I the only one who smirked when he saw Ruby code for Twitter? Sorry, just fits a stereotype ;)

What else would you write it in (besides python)?

I just meant that the Ruby and Twitter in the same sentence provoke certain stereotypical images in my head.

What would I write this in? I wouldn't write this.

Still, well done to the guy. It's good code.

... and the stereotype probably fits :)

I was just playing around with the API and thought I'd do this a quick little exercise. Once it worked, I thought I'd share. Thanks for the kind words.

Is it because Twitter runs on Ruby? What if I mentioned Scala and Twitter in the same sentence?

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