Our new home is here: http://89n.com/blog/manageflitter

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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!

http://anthillonline.com/manageflitter-smart-100/

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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:

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.

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Firstly a BIG thank you to everyone who entered the "Help Dain" competition we ran recently.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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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