ManageFlitter Blog

Just a quick update to let you know that we've passed some pretty big milestones on ManageFlitter. We've now made over 10 million unfollows for the 50 thousand accounts who have used our service! Almost every day we have more new users than the day before.

Thank you to everyone who continues to use ManageFlitter.

We want to keep making our service better for you. Please let us know what features you'd most like to see added in the comments below!

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Well, our last blog post caused a bit of a stir. Thank you to the nearly 2000 people who tweeted and commented about it! Even TechCrunch offered their support.

After chatting with Twitter, it became clear that their main problem with our existing service was that users were not being individually selected to be unfollowing. We've removed the "Select All" button and the default selection on accounts when a page is loaded. Instead we've come up with a bit of an interface compromise which Twitter has tentatively approved. Each page now has an expandable overview where you can now drag your mouse across the avatars of accounts to select them for unfollowing. We've included a screenshot below.

In addition to this interface change, we have also changed the name of our application to ManageFlitter to avoid using Twitter's trademark in our name. Why Flitter? Well flitter means "to flutter" which birds do, particularly when you get a lot of them! Also it's, uh, only two letters from "Twitter" :)

We hope these changes will allow us to continue opperating within Twitter's guidelines indefinitely.

Happy unfollowing!

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If you are a user of ManageTwitter.com and you would like ManageTwitter.com's service to continue, please retweet this tweet, use the tag #savemanagetwitter or leave a comment below. Twitter want us to remove the heart of our application - we need your support!

Here at Melon Media, we love Twitter. I mean REALLY love Twitter. We developed ManageTwitter.com in our "10% project time". Our other twitter products include AdAdmire - a monetisation platform with a twist for third party Twitter applications & @_spell - a spelling tool for tweets.

Managetwitter.com was developed in the spirit of strengthening the Twitter ecosystem. We believe the more relevant your Twitter stream is to the user, the more the user will engage with Twitter and thereby more value the user will add to the Twitter ecosystem. We've unfollowed nearly 6 million people for the over 35000 users who have used ManageTwitter. We receive constant thanks and compliments from users about the system and how the application assisted in raising the quality of their tweet stream. Here is a graph of the activity on ManageTwitter per day (the initial spike coming from a TechCrunch article). People love our service, they keep coming back, using it again and again.

It surprised me therefore when we received an email this morning from Twitter:

"We're writing to let you know that your application, ManageTwitter, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk automated user unfollowing, which is not allowed. It's best for both our
users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes, such as removing the "Select All" option (and requiring users to decide on each user individually) to bring your application into compliance. "

Yes our application does facilitate bulk unfollowing BUT ManageTwitter does not facilitate any *automated* bulk unfollowing, the user has to filter based on criteria. The user is still required to do significant processing to unfollow groups of people. Furthermore the system only allows unfollowing of up to only 100 at a time.

I do understand the spirit of Twitter's "Automation Rules and Best Practises" - unfiltered, unregulated automatic following and following is not what Twitter is about - we get that and support that.

But surely a service such as ManageTwitter.com that ENHANCES the Twitter user experience is adding value to the Twitter ecosystem? Over time a Twitter account can get "bloated" - accounts that you follow can become inactive, accounts that you thought would be interesting become stale, accounts that you followed can overtweet cluttering your stream and so on. Managing your followers and people that you follow can easily become a chore. We developed Managetwitter.com to assist users prune and clean their twitter account with the aim that the user will engage MORE with their own Twitter account.

We would like Twitter to reconsider their request to us to change the way our service works.

If you are a user of ManageTwitter.com and you would like ManageTwitter.com's service to continue, please retweet this tweet, use the tag #savemanagetwitter or leave a comment below.

Twitter want us to remove the heart of our application - we need your support!

Thanks.

Kevin Garber (@ke_ga) , James Peter (@zemaj) and the team.

Update Tuesday 27 April 2010: We are currently in discussions with Twitter and hope to report back on a positive way forward.  Thank you for all of your support.  

Update Tuesday 3 May 2010: As per request from Twitter we will be changing the name of our service  - to ManageFlitter.com and we will also make the system changes that they have requested.  Hopefully the service will still remain of strong value to Twitter users.  Twitter have been professional and reasonable in their communications with us and we look forward to a good working relationship with them

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managetwitter.com has been live for about 1 month.

In that time managetwitter.com has assisted over 30 000 Twitter users unfollow over 5.5 million people that they are following.

30 000 users and 5.5 million unfollows is a decent size dataset - we thought that it would be interesting to see which Twitter accounts were the
most unfollowed via managetwitter.com.

So hear you have it *drum roll* - the 10 most unfollowed Twitter accounts via managetwitter.com over the list month.

10. UberTwiter
9. MrTweet
8. BillGates
7. twibbon
6. mashable
5. BarackObama
4. twitter
3. google
2. tinychat
Most unfollowed Twitter account: 1. wefollow

The biggest surprise of the list was Bill Gates. Out of the 100 million plus users on Twitter we wouldn't have predicted that one of the world's richest men and original technology heavyweights would also be the most unfollowed. 

Could it be because Gates mainly tweets about philanthropic based activities which the technology/entertainment/business skewed Twitter audience may be more averse to?

Kevin Garber
@ke_Ga

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Here at Melon Media we've tried many different hosting options for scalable infrastructure. From dedicated servers, to Amazon EC2, to Rackspace Cloud Sites, they all have their benefits and weaknesses. What can be really interesting is how they handle when they get hit with a large traffic spike. When the pressure is on and time is critical, some systems shine and others... cause nervous breakdowns.

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Wow, it's been a crazy 20 hours. After a surprising (and nice!) review on TechCrunch http://tcrn.ch/9sW6F3 traffic flew through the roof. We've gone from just under 400 users to over 10,000 and from just under 20,000 unfollows to over 500,000.

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