

Twitter Mutual Followers and Unfollows - A Quick Hack - simontabor
http://twitter.simontabor.com

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dustyreagan
Nice work! I actually created something very similar
<http://friendorfollow.com>.

The hard part is dealing with Twitter's API rate limit and scaling. It's
nearly impossible to pull down the data for large accounts like @aplusk. 5k
id's at a time, pulled synchronously (due to Twitter's API paging system), by
the time you're able to get all the data, he's already received 1k new
followers.

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mcantelon
That's my #1 Twitter tool... thanks for making it!

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dustyreagan
Thanks for saying so! Thanks for using it! :)

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ZitchDog
It seems to max out at 5000 followers (which makes some sense because the
default behavior of the twitter API is to return the first 5000 ids)

This may seem nit-picky, but the main cool-factor of this is to see which
high-profile people follow each other, which it _almost_ works for.

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simontabor
Thanks for the feedback - Twitter does only return 5000 followers and
following and I'll try to add support for high-profile people in the future.
There is the issue of the 150 requests per hour limit that Twitter has per IP
which means that it can't work on really big people without using a service
like DataSift.

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joelg87
Hi Simon. The rate limiting is per Twitter credentials once authorized through
OAuth, so you shouldn't have any issues there :)

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jarofgreen
Actually you are still rate limited when using OAuth credentials, it's just a
higher rate.

If you can get users to log-in to your app and can then call the API with many
different credentials it does help a lot tho.

I did a twitter hack at a recent hackday, and had massive problems with this.
:-) <http://jarofgreen.co.uk/2012/04/flocklight/> (It's Open Source if anyone
wants to help)

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jc4p
I don't quite understand the point of this. What's the benefit? Isn't this the
exact same thing as going through my Followers list on Twitter and looking at
which ones don't have the blue "Following" button next to them (which would
give me the more interesting metric, people whom follow me but I don't
follow)?

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simontabor
Apologies - I do need to do the reverse but most people follow more people
than follow them. And yeah it is the exact same thing as that, but you can
search it and monitor who's unfollowed you since you last saved your list. You
can also track/check other people so it's more useful than just looking for
the blue following button - which I often find buggy

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martinrd
I made <http://twollof.com> some time ago, which also notifies UFs by mention
if you want. :)

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rockcy
This is one of the many possible ways of viewing twitter followers.

<http://www.justunfollow.com> provides many other views:

1) Tweeps you're following but not following you back. 2) Tweeps following you
but you're not following back. 3) Tweeps who recently unfollowed you. 4)
Tweeps who recently followed you. 5) Tweeps you're following but haven't
tweeted for the past 1 month. 6) All the tweeps you're following.

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nischalshetty
Hi, thanks for listing JustUnfollow. I made this about 2 years ago and we're 2
months away from hitting a million users... Last week we launched a native
Android app and we'll soon be launching an iPhone app as well :)

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shazow
Here's one I built some years ago: <http://www.tweepsect.com/>

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evertonfuller
What is the point of this? It was incorrect with the username I put in.

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simontabor
What username did you put in?

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casouniquo
<http://who.unfollowed.me/> another one

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ankush108
Is it open source ?

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simontabor
I'm planning on making all the projects on my site open source on GitHub but
haven't got round to it yet, watch this space!

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mehulkar
I was just going to ask to see the source. Pretty nifty. Liked the speed.

