

6 Million Unfollows Later, Twitter Moves To Silence ManageTwitter - zemaj
http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/24/twitter-managetwitter/

======
pwim
_Or maybe Twitter just doesn’t like the fact that ManageTwitter has managed to
help 35,000 users unfollow nearly 6 million people on the service. I can’t
imagine any social network would like a third-party service changing the
social graph in such a way._

I would imagine Twitter would like to increase the _quality_ of the social
graph rather than purely the size.

~~~
kristiandupont
So would I but I can also easily imagine a scenario where some VC or other
interested party focuses entirely on one metric, such as "connections".

------
zemaj
This seems to be a persistent issue with third party developers. If I was
bringing out a service to compete for third party developers on my app, I'd
add some sort of streamlined approval process. Some way to guarantee that the
rug wouldn't been pulled out from under developers 6 months down the track.

------
gyardley
This (and any other move by Twitter to restrict unfollowing in bulk) is just
an anti-spam measure.

Direct marketers follow as many people in bulk as they can without being
flagged as spam, a small percentage automatically follow them back, everyone
else gets bulk unfollowed, repeat. By doing this you can eventually accumulate
an account with thousands of followers which you can then pump commercial
messages to. The system works but it's a volume game - if you can't automate
the process, you can't make enough money for your time. By breaking tools that
enable mass unfollowing, Twitter makes the automation harder and therefore
fights spam.

ManageTwitter almost certainly knows this.

------
adrianwaj
All ManageTwitter need to do is remove SelectAll as Twitter want and replace
it with individual selection upon mouseover, which is still pretty quick.

BaitCrunch title regardless

------
Tichy
Crap, I really like Twitter, but as it turns out, depending on a third party
for your app, you are depending on a third party. Twitter might turn out to be
not much better than Apple in that regard :-(

------
alexro
I don't understand the problem at all. Why would you follow so many crappy
people that then you want to unfollow them in bulk?

Thinking about this makes Twitter sound right

------
shadowsun7
There's a simple solution to this: acquire ManageTwitter, and then find a
clever way to integrate this to the core service (with controls that Twitter
approves of).

