Outsourcing clicks - a solution to Twitter's bulk unfollowing/following removal

Outsourcing clicks - a solution to Twitter's bulk unfollowing/following removal(manageflitter.com)

9 points by zemaj 12 years ago | 7 comments

ashray 12 years ago |

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 12 years ago |

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...

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 12 years ago | |

> 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"

ChuckMcM 12 years ago | |

It reminds me of Aero's little antennas each receiving broadcast television which they then re-stream over the net. A nice hack on the ToS!

Kiro 12 years ago |

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 12 years ago | |

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).

Shank 12 years ago |

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.