This blog has moved!
Our new home is here: http://89n.com/blog/manageflitter
Is ManageFlitter the most innovative SMART 100 company? It could be - with your help...
ManageFlitter has been nominated for the Australian Anthill SMART 100 index.
As a tech-passionate Australian company, we aim to be the greatest at what we do, and ManageFlitter has undoubtedly become one of the best tools for managing your Twitter followers, finding new followers and keeping your Twitter list clean.
But while we work on the good stuff that's inside the business, we need your help in getting the word out outside the business!
Australian Anthill is an online business magazine that highlights the inspiring thrills, spills, trials and tribulations of business development and rapid commercial growth.
Their SMART 100 index aims at "unearthing, analysing and promoting Australian innovation, ... to identify and rank Australia’s 100 most innovative products..."
Basically it's a popularity contest.
So this is where you come in.
By going to this link http://anthillonline.com/manageflitter-smart-100/ and clicking the Tweet button 
, the Like button 
, or leaving a signed comment,you will be helping push ManageFlitter to the top of the list (where it should be!).
So please go and spread the word. The more publicity we get, the more Twitter users we can help and the greater ManageFlitter will become!
Tweet on your behalf clarification
Hi everyone!
A couple of days ago, Twitter changed the look of the page that appears when you allow an app to connect to your Twitter account - the authentication page.
This has raised a few questions for people as it now explicitly states:
Now obviously we don't update your profile. Ever. And we would let you know if we were going to do that.
The "Post tweets on your behalf" text refers to the various sections within the system that allow you to tweet information.
You may have noticed that after initially connecting, there is a box at the top which says "X number of people I follow are not following me back", or, "X people have unfollowed me in the past 24 hours", with a "Tweet This" link next to it.
By clicking the "Tweet this" link, you are allowing ManageFlitter to tweet on your behalf (using the Twitter API).
• ManageFlitter's Promise • No surprise tweets. While using ManageFlitter we will not post tweets nor perform updates you did not explicitly request.
We do not tweet anything without your knowledge or express consent.
I hope this clarifies the text - and if you have any questions at all about ManageFlitter please don't hesitate to contact us: contact@manageflitter.com
Thank you for using ManageFlitter!
Dain.
Who helped Dain?!
Firstly a BIG thank you to everyone who entered the "Help Dain" competition we ran recently.
We had hundreds of entries and Dain actually shed a tear from the response - believing that you all cared about him (we didn't shatter his bubble by telling him that you were all entering just for the Pro+ accounts).
After sitting down and letting our pet intern... I mean, valued employee... sort through the ideas - we have come up with the five winners we promised.
They are, in no particular order:
You have all just garnered FREE LIFETIME PRO+ ACCOUNTS!
A special mention goes out to @mcappetta for his idea: "Purchase Madison Square Garden, and change name to ManageFlitter Garden" - we can't actually ever use that idea due to budgetary constraints (unless you want to loan us the $$$) but we liked it enough to give you access to the Pro+ account for 1 month.
So thank you all again for entering and keep an eye on our Twitter and blog - we'll be running another competition soon!
Pro upgrades temporarily unavailable
Unfortunately we are currently having problems accepting payments via PayPal.
Our account has been temporarily limited. PayPal have confirmed confirmed that they have all the documentation needed to remove this limitation, although they have been confirming this with us for over a week...
We have been told the limitation will be lifted within 24 hours. Until our account is restored you will not be able to upgrade to a Pro account.
Sorry for the inconvenience! We will keep you updated here if we receive any new information.
Update: Thanks to our tenacious CEO being on the phone all day to various people at PayPal, our account has been restored! You can now upgrade your account by going to http://manageflitter.com/pro
Posted by ManageFlitter
Comments [0]
New Features For Pro+ Accounts
Ever since releasing Pro+ accounts last month we’ve been hard at work inventing, coding, featurising, installing, testing and forever twirling, twirling.
Why? Because even though ManageFlitter is good, nay, awesome - it can still be better.
So you may have noticed that we quietly released a couple of extra features into our Pro+ accounts.
First up is the “People Adder” under the “Follow” tab. For the past year we’ve made it super easy to unfollow people in your account. Now we’re trying to do the same for follows. The People Adder will allow you to search through peoples most recent tweets for keywords that you’re interested in.
For example, I really like The Muppets. A quick search shows that 1,364 people made 1,500 tweets about “Muppets” in the past three days.
It’s a great way to find people tweeting about what you are interested in and follow them. It works with hash-tags too.
The other update is a “Refresh” button on the “Dashboard” tab. This clears the cache and the connection between ManageFlitter and Twitter and then grabs all of the latest information again. Useful if you’ve just done a whole lot of following/unfollowing and want this reflected in ManageFlitter.
Why? Because even though ManageFlitter is good, nay, awesome - it can still be better.
So you may have noticed that we quietly released a couple of extra features into our Pro+ accounts.
First up is the “People Adder” under the “Follow” tab. For the past year we’ve made it super easy to unfollow people in your account. Now we’re trying to do the same for follows. The People Adder will allow you to search through peoples most recent tweets for keywords that you’re interested in.
For example, I really like The Muppets. A quick search shows that 1,364 people made 1,500 tweets about “Muppets” in the past three days.
It’s a great way to find people tweeting about what you are interested in and follow them. It works with hash-tags too.
The other update is a “Refresh” button on the “Dashboard” tab. This clears the cache and the connection between ManageFlitter and Twitter and then grabs all of the latest information again. Useful if you’ve just done a whole lot of following/unfollowing and want this reflected in ManageFlitter.
We've got more updates in the works. You'll hear about them first here - or follow @manageflitter on Twitter.
ManageFlitter Goes Pro!
After several months of development, we’re pleased to release a big update for ManageFlitter!
There are some improvements across the board which everyone can take advantage off;
- Faster and more reliable loading of data from Twitter
- Faster page loads when filtering your lists
- Accounts of all size can be processed (no 5000 following limit)
- Many UI improvements including better page navigation, bio tabs and less distracting popup boxes.
We also wanted to add some more powerful features which would only be possible on a paid account due to their complexity. With ManageFlitter Pro we aim to make ManageFlitter the one tool you need to quickly manage every aspect of who you follow on Twitter. ManageFlitter Pro has the following features;
- Whitelist people you don't want to unfollow. Whitelisting is a powerful way to speed up the way you use ManageFlitter. By adding people who will never follow you back or you people you have permanent connections with to your whitelist you can stop these people showing on all the filters on the unfollow tab. This can greatly reduce the time it take to filter you list - particularly if you use ManageFlitter every day to monitor your followers.
- Instant logins - no loading. By leveraging our powerful new architecture, we can cut out the load time for Pro accounts. We constantly monitor Pro accounts for changes on Twitter and update our records so that you will have an accurate list of users as soon as you login!
- Pro Mode enables powerful new filtering options. Pro Mode is our solution to building power filters on top of all of your Twitter connections. Using Pro mode you can combine multiple filters and see the results instantly. See who is verified and following you. See who is inactive, has no bio and is not following you back. With Pro Mode you can.
- Quickly follow everyone who has recently @replied to you, or you have retweeted. By showing you only people who have @replied you to that you don't follow, these filters make the task of following back people who have engaged with you dramatically faster.
- See which of your followers you aren't following back. We've added a whole new Follow tab which allows you filter your followers in the same way that the Unfollow tab allows you filter who you follow. Quickly navigate through your entire list of followers.
- Unlimited daily follow and unfollows. (Standard accounts have a 1000 follow/unfollow limit). Need to get that instant fix of unfollowing thousands of accounts in one day - with Pro you can!
- Track everyone who has unfollowed you and when. Receive detailed email reports of who has followed or unfollowed you daily, weekly or monthly. Because we're constantly monitoring your Twitter account we can perform some very detailed tracking. Our email reports list everything you want to know about people who have followed or unfollowed you, all in single digest report!
- Coming soon: see detailed reports of your extended social graph. Find out who all your friends are following and you aren't. We're working on a bunch of new reports like this one. Let us know if you think it'll be useful to you.
We hope you enjoy these changes that we have made! We're going to continue working on ManageFlitter and ManageFlitter Pro adding new features to both systems. Let us know in the comment section below which features you'd most like to see added or improved on.
Posted by ManageFlitter
Comments [13]
ManageFlitter Downtime - What went wrong
Access to ManageFlitter was disabled for around 50 hours over Tuesday and Wednesday. For a couple of days before that unfollows were not being completely processed. This blog post is an explanation of what occurred.We had our first indication that something was wrong with the system on Friday afternoon when we received a couple of emails saying that unfollows were not being processed. We initially replied to these emails asking people to check the system again later as it can take some time for the request queue to complete. We have occasionally received emails like this in the past when there have not been issues.Over the weekend we continued to receive emails from people saying the system was not always working for them. We ran a few tests and found nothing wrong. We didn’t see an increase in the error rate through the system, so there was no indication that our unfollow requests to Twitter were being dropped.On Monday after continued complaints from users we did some more extensive testing and discovered that not all unfollows were appearing in Twitter’s pages. After digging in the API requests we were sending to Twitter we noticed that there were strange results being returned with an error structure that was not documented for the requests we were making. We disabled access to the system while we sent a request to Twitter to find out what the problem was.After a little digging on Twitter’s end it turned out they had implemented some site wide policies that rate limited API requests on a per-IP basis that were previously unbound. Twitter gave us no notice or provided no documentation about this change which resulted in our extended downtime. The error structure was unrecognised so it took us longer to respond than usual.Once we understood the cause, we quickly implemented a change that gave us distributed messaging queuing on API requests that allowed us to rate limit and balance our unfollow & follow requests across several IPs.After we brought the system up 24 hours ago we saw a large spike in traffic which meant that some unfollows took around an hour to processes. All unfollows from the past 24 hours were processed successfully. We’ve also now spun up some additional servers so future requests should consistently be processed even faster. We will work to display the estimated time it will take for unfollow to be processed in the ManageFlitter UI as we know it’s confusing when you request an unfollow, but it doesn’t show up in your account.Unfortunately we rely on Twitter to notify us of these changes and processes our requests in consistent matter. When changes are made without notification it can take us some time to respond. We have improved our error logged and distributed our requests in order to help keep the system running smoothly. We apologise for this extended period of downtime and instability. We understand it is frustrating and many of you use ManageFlitter on a daily basis. We plan to identify and respond to these changes faster in the future.
Regards,James Peter - CTO
ManageFlitter
Regards,James Peter - CTO
ManageFlitter
Posted by ManageFlitter
Comments [6]
Status Update: Unfollows not being processed
There appears to be a problem with some of the unfollows through the system not being processes.
These unfollows are being sent to Twitter through the API, but the changes to not appear on people's accounts.
We are currently investigating this problem and will post another update here once it is resolved.
Update: There appears to be a bug in Twitter's API. We are waiting on Twitter to respond to our support request.
Update2: We're still waiting on information from Twitter, but the system seems to have stabilised. We're bringing it back up and have improved our error logging so that we can detect faster when there are problems like this in the future. We will monitor the situation and let you know more about the cause once we do.
Update3: Sorry, Twitter has started throwing errors again. Taking the system back down. Still waiting on Twitter for more information.
Update4: We have received information from Twitter about what changes have occured and are making modifications to ManageFlitter to bring the system back up within the next few hours.
Update5: We have brought the system back up at a reduced capacity. You can only currently unfollow 200 people every 24 hours. Once we stabilize the job queue and confirm everything is working we will increase this number.
Update6: The system should now be completely restored. We will continue to monitor the situation and post another blog post with more information about the incident tomorrow.
Posted by ManageFlitter
Comments [13]
ManageFlitter Update
First up; thanks for your continued support! We've now processed over 57,000,000 unfollows for 140,000 users. That's a lot of unfollowing!
As we continue to grow, we occasionally hit up against limits that twitter has put in place to restrict agressive activity on their system. Some of our most active users have been hitting these limits which has caused Twitter to take down our service for everyone. It also means that it has sometimes taken a very long time to process your unfollows. We apologize for this inconvenience.
As a result we've now put in (reasonable!) restrictions on the number of people you can unfollow in certain time limits. These numbers may change over time, but they're currently at 1,500 every 24 hours. This should only affect a very small percentage of users of the service and will allow us to keep the rest of the site stable for everyone.
You will be alerted if you hit one of these limits. Please let email us at contact@manageflitter.com if you experience any unusual problems using the site as a result of this change.
Thanks again for using ManageFlitter.
PS: We're currently working on some very cool additional features for the site :) Stay tuned!
Posted by ManageFlitter
Comments [6]
Comments [0]