From time to time, it’s a good idea to clear out twitter accounts that have gone stale. These are people that haven’t tweeted for a while. They do no harm, but why follow someone who isn’t there?
This would be practically impossible if it weren’t for a fantastic service: UnTweeps
With UnTweeps, you authorize it using Twitter’s OAuth function, which means you don’t need to give out your username and password (which you should NEVER do!). It then goes through the people you follow on twitter and lists the ones that haven’t tweeted for awhile. You set how long that period should be, but the default is 30 days.
The problem is that due to Twitter’s terms of service, they can no longer have a “select all” function. Now that’s fine if you are only following 30 people, but when you have the sort of numbers many of us do, it can be awfully time consuming selecting every checkbox. So I haven’t done it for quite a long time. But it was time to take the plunge. sidenote: do you like how I’ve broken all the rules of English in this paragraph? lol
So rather than click each of the thousand or so checkboxes, I went and found a firefox greasemonkey script that would do it all for me.
It’s over at http://www.squarefree.com/2005/04/13/checkrange/. It’s ridiculously easy to install and run. If you haven’t got greasemonkey running on firefox already, head over to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748/ and follow the prompts. Then go to squarefree and install the CheckRange script. As of the time of writing this post, there are no problems with firefox compatibility and the script was safe for me.
Once that’s all done (you may have to restart your browser if you didn’t already have greasemonkey), head over to UnTweeps, follow the steps til you get to the list of ppl to unfollow. Select the first checkbox, then scroll to the bottom and select the last checkbox while holding SHIFT (or equivalent on a Mac)… And Bob’s your uncle, all checked!
Make sure you go through the list and unselect anyone you might still want to follow. One of my friends, @AdrianPavone hadn’t tweeted for a few weeks because he was away and I would have unfollowed him if I had not gone through and checked. That would’ve made things awkward as I wouldn’t have realized I’d done it, but he’d know.
As with anything, just be careful how you use it and you’ll be ok.
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