

Show HN: Grim Tweeper, easy way to clean up Twitter 'follow' lists - wesleyzhao
http://grimtweeper.com

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plnewman
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.

~~~
shazow
<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).

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raganwald
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."

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

~~~
StavrosK
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?

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te_chris
because twitter doesn't granulate permissions like facebook does.

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StavrosK
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...](http://blog.stochastictechnologies.com/gaining-read-only-access-to-
twitters-api)

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wsxiaoys
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.

~~~
jlees
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?)

~~~
wesleyzhao
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.

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mduvall
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).

~~~
wesleyzhao
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.

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yahelc
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.

~~~
wesleyzhao
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.

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RBr
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.

~~~
wesleyzhao
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.

~~~
RBr
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.

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bobabooey
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...

~~~
dshipper
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 :)

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MatthewPhillips
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).

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

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bauchidgw
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

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

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tessr
Something else for us to look into then!

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

~~~
wesleyzhao
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.

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drowsydream
First Twitter link at the bottom, is misspelt,

