Posted: July 5th, 2010 | Author: Chris Norton | Filed under: Cleansing tools, Tweasier, Twitter Apps, Twitter Management, Twitter Tool | Tags: Tweasier, Twitter app, twitter management application, Twitter Tool | 1 Comment »
For the last nine months I have been working on creating a Twitter management application that added value to the Twitter experience. The application, called Tweasier, is currently in beta testing and has several hundred people using it on a daily basis – I have found their feedback absolutely invaluable and I now recognise the importance of having a beta period. During these nine months I have seen a variety of Twitter applications have their services or features throttled by Twitter and I have been asking myself why?
A good example of this was Twitter Karma which allowed the average Twitter user to sort their friends by people who were following them back. It was a useful tool which meant that you could cleanse your account from time to time and keep the numbers down to a reasonable and manageable level.
Sometimes people you follow, just stop using Twitter altogether, so a spring clean can be effective.
As Twitter has grown, so has the noise in an average users Twitter account. The early adopters of Twitter used to see pretty much everybody’s tweets but now, as there are so many interesting and insightful people out there to follow, you can occasionally miss an important tweet or two. For a news junkie like myself I hate to think that but that’s the way it is on Twitter these days and we have all come to accept it.
Too Many Fail Whales
Twitter has had a bit of a bad run recently launching a few new features which have stumbled and cause the network to break down on regular occasions. Sometimes I actually feel I might as well start having a relationship with the FAIL WHALE as I see him more often that my own account. However, this has prompted Twitter to reduce the limit of requests third-party-applications like Tweasier, Tweetdeck and Hootsuite can make it to its API (down to 175).
By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.
My Advice to Twitter
So my first bit of advice to Twitter is to sort the stability of the network out and return the trust to the users and the developers which have helped make Twitter as popular as it is toady.
My second piece of advice is to re-examine bringing back bulk unfollowing. Now don’t get me wrong I am not a spammer and I don’t believe in spamming but surely there is a better way to stop Twitter spammers than removing the usefulness of bulk unfollowing from all third-party applications.
Twitter actually changed its rules and now only allows single line unfollowing. In my opinion this is wrong, so please bring back features like bulk unfollowing, so the regular users can trim their accounts when they need trimming otherwise it makes it a far harder process to spring clean an account and people will be following dead accounts which is surely a bad thing for Twitter anyway.
My answer to stopping the spammers is simple, when a users syncs their account with an application their details are kept in the user’s profile. Why then can’t Twitter just have something that flags up when an account is growing and reducing at an alarming rate using one of these applications? Ban these guys whose accounts fluctuate and keep the users happy by giving us back a useful features.
I would love to offer Tweasier’s users the capacity to select all but the way the rules stand that won’t be the case for some time.
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Posted: May 21st, 2010 | Author: Illiya Vjestica | Filed under: Cleansing tools, Twitter Management, Twitter Tool | Tags: twitter, Twitter Management, Twitter Tool | No Comments »
Today the Tweasier blog presents, one of my most favourite Twitter tools that I frequently used in the early months of my Twitter experience. Friendorfollow.com is a great Twitter cleansing and simple analysis tool allowing you to see the following:
- Who’s not following you back on Twitter?
- Who are you not following back?
- Who are your mutual friends? Find out!
These are the big questions every Twitter user wants to know straight answers to.
These people don’t follow me back
Following section
The great thing about FriendorFollow, is it allows you to quickly access the Twitter accounts who aren’t following you. Of course not every account is going to follow you back, some celebrities for example probably won’t give you the time or day. I wonder though, who are those individuals that you thought were following you back and actually aren’t. This is where FriendorFollow comes to the rescue!
Sort by feature
A cool feature on Friendorfollow.com is the drop down menu that allows you to sort Twitter accounts for the following
- By Username
- Name
- Location
- Followers
- Following
- Last Tweet
- Account age
It is a nice little feature that lets you analyse your Twitter following with more depth and certainly helps if your looking to clean up your profile.
Your fans
Your fans are Twitter accounts that are following your profile although you don’t follow them back. My personal account @kungfudigital has 435 people following me who I don’t follow back.
Your friends
These are the accounts who are following your profile and who you follow back. In this section, I have about 238 people who I follow and who follow me back.
Limitations
With all free apps there are certain limitations. In FriendorFollow’s case to remove a Twitter follower from your account you need to click on the invidual profile icon first. Having login into Twitter already, you can then remove the user manually by using Twitter’s unfollow functionality.
Conclusion
Overall though, Friendorfollow.com is a useful little tool for quickly analysing your Twitter following. If your looking for a Twitter tool that goes more in depth into the managment and analysis of your Twitter account, then stay tuned and watch this space…
About this blog post
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, then you can take a look at Illiya’s other posts on his blog or follow him on Twitter.
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Posted: February 26th, 2010 | Author: Chris Norton | Filed under: Cleansing tools, Twitter Apps, Twitter Tool | Tags: Twitter app, Twitter Tool | No Comments »
This week there was news of a new tool out called justunfollow.com, which is a really simple Twitter friend cleansing tool. Basically you log-in with the usual Twitter OAuth authentication and then you click show non-followers. It’s quite responsive and brings you back with a list of people that are not following you back. If you wish you can then unfollow them there and then – cleansing your friends.
I think this is one of the easiest unfollow tools I have used – so it would go down as number one but I thought I would also share some other tools which are useful for managing your friends.
2. www.refollow.com – this is a powerful Twitter management tool which we have talked about before. It is really useful and has some great features. The bulk unfollow feature was almost removed recently due to Twitter making a request but that seems to have been sorted now.
3. Nestunclutterer – This is a slick little app and you can white list friends that don’t follow you back that you want to follow.
4. Friendorfollow – you don’t log-in using the Twitter OAuth authentication with this but it seems a little less responsive than some of the others. It provides you with your background (see below) and all of the people that aren’t following you back. If you hover over their images it gives you their statistics.
5. unTweeps.com, we have covered this one on the blog before. Here is a useful Twitter tool which can be a little slow to use but is quite a good idea. After logging in (with your Twitter account), enter the number of days in the past you want to check. If you enter 30, then anyone who hasn’t updated their Twitter status (tweeted) in the past 30 days will be shown on a list. You can then unfollow them as you wish. This also has a whitelisting option for your friends.
6. Twitter Karma – This was a really useful tool for managing your Twitter friends but in January Twitter asked them to remove its bulk unfollow feature which now kind of makes it redundant (hence the position). We hope the developers apply to Twitter to make a few amends and get that feature back as it was pretty useful.
Do you have a Twitter friend cleansing tool to share? Let us know about it!
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By doing this applications have become much less stable and I personally think this may well start affecting the user’s relationship and love for the network.
