

Outsourcing clicks - a solution to Twitter's bulk unfollowing/following removal - zemaj
http://manageflitter.com/account-management

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ashray
I just wrote a script to do the follow/unfollow thing myself. When tweetadder
removed their auto follow/unfollow system due to pressure from twitter - there
weren't any other options left in the market.

So, I ended up doing exactly what I should've done long ago myself. Wrote a
python script to connect to the twitter api and do the exact same thing. Sure,
it's not as interactive as tweetadder [no excel style tables of who was
followed, etc.] but it works fine for me. Most importantly, it'll continue
running on my Linode even while my own computer is off, so it runs 24x7x365.
Works pretty well :] The other advantage is that I don't really pump through
an unrealistic number of followers per day so I fly much lower than twitter's
API limits. This doesn't attract any attention and works better in the long
run.

Also, at least for the niches I use it in this is an extremely effective
method of getting very high quality followers.

EDIT: For those who are unfamiliar with this kind of software - this is a
pretty simple method to gain a lot of followers. Run twitter searches on
things relevant to your niche, follow people who tweet about those things,
some of those people will follow you back, unfollow the ones who do not follow
you back - gain net followers. (some niches turn out very high quality
followers with this method..) There was software that automated this for you
(say, you could run auto searches and follow 200 people a day) but twitter
barred these companies from allowing automatic functionality sometime earlier
this year..

------
zemaj
Disclosure; I'm ManageFlitter's Co-Founder/CTO

Twitter recently stopped apps from offering any kind of bulk management
services for Twitter accounts. We completely support Twitter trying to stop
spam, but this action does nothing of the kind. Here's my full thoughts;
[http://blog.manageflitter.com/twitter-drowning-spam-why-
thei...](http://blog.manageflitter.com/twitter-drowning-spam-why-their-
current-approach-wont-save-us-and-what-will)

Anyway the point of this service us just to point out how ridiculous the
restrictions are. We will really be delivering it, however - the economics
work. We're just finalising how we'll prove it's real people, most likely with
a live stream going at all times.

~~~
nonchalance
> Just by measuring a few simple indicators, and plugging them into a baysian
> probability algorithm, we've been able to detect spam accounts with a very
> high accuracy.

slight nitpick: the word is "Bayesian", not "baysian"

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Kiro
Can someone explain what this is about? Why would you need this? I know
nothing about Twitter and have never heard of bulk unfollowing before.

~~~
petercooper
Back in ze old days, you could follow a ton of people, wait a while to see how
many follow back (it used to be quite a lot), and then unfollow all the ones
who didn't. Rinse and repeat and you get a lot of followers.

Eventually you'd unfollow a ton of people so that your follow/follower ratio
looks healthier. For example, an account following 10000 people with 10000
followers doesn't look very authoritative. An account following 40 people with
10000 followers looks quite serious/valuable.

The reason this works is that people are notified of people who follow them
but not of unfollows (they may have changed this but the fact is fewer people
are notified of unfollows if at all).

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Shank
Correct me if I'm wrong, but can't every service claim to be a "human manager"
like this, then run a well built scraper to emulate a human? Unless they're
going to have a camera on the humans, Twitter could just as easily shut them
down on this premise alone. There's no way to prove there are humans there.

