ManageFlitter Blog

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