Help Me Solve a Problem

December 29, 2007 · Comments

InboxHellContinues Thankful as I am for followers in Twitter, I need a way to streamline the process of adding people back. I’ve timed it and it takes me about 24 seconds from clicking on the message in my inbox to adding the person on the Twitter site, to comin back and deleting a message. That means, whenever I get a batch of new followers (about 30-60 a day right now), I’m going through a rather time-consuming process. I don’t want to automatically reciprocate, because I have a few rules as to who I add, so here’s what I want to do.

  1. Upon receiving a message that so-and-so is following me on Twitter, I want to strip the http://twitter.com/username out of the email.
  2. I want to dump that into a text file (that grows with each subsequent new message).
  3. I want to delete the original message.
  4. Then I’ll manually work with that text file later.

How can I accomplish this? Do I have to build a pop3 gmail account in either Mail or Thunderbird and work from THAT?

Your thoughts would be appreciated.

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  • You may find it easier to use the Twitter API rather than trying to parse the incoming emails.

    1: Open your text file. Read each name (line) into an array.

    2: If you call (using something like CURL) the following URL:

    http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?lite=...

    You'll get back an XML file which is a LOT easier to parse... loop through it looking for the text then select the text between that point at

    3: If the name is found in the array from [1], then move on to the next... If it's NOT in the array, append it to the text file.


    Obviously, that would give you a script that could either be run by hand (at the point you wanted to review), or in a crontab job, say at midnight.


    I'm not at home at the moment, but if you want to go down this route, let me know, and I'll knock up a quick file that will do it for you.

    Mark
  • Actually, a couple of followup notes to that:

    1: I'm using XML rather than JSON because I find it _WAY_ easier to lexically parse in a srcipt for an application like this.

    2: In your code, you'll need to add some parameters - your username and password - to the line you call from CURL.

    3: If you do it this way, you can just write a mail rule that DELETES the BACN from Twitter :-)

    4: If you wanted to be really cute, you could parse the list of followers, then check with twitter whether you'd friended them and not bother writing them to the file if you had. That way, your file would be a "to do" list rather than a "follower archive".
  • Someone needs to write a 3rd party app to do this with logic in it that the user can modify.

    Or, twitter needs to add this as a feature. Kinda like the spam filter in WordPress.

    Present me with a list of people that are following me, who I am not following.

    Display their following to followers ratio.

    Display their URL.

    Give me checkboxes.

    [ ] Follow
    [ ] Don't follow

    The let me batch add them...
  • rob
    I'm not sure, but I'm sorta partial to the second to the bottom one :)
  • Rob,
    I'd add you on twitter but I can't find your twitter name on yiur web page.
    What is it?
    --Steve
  • Of course, the easiest way to save time with Twitter is to not Twitter at all. I find that saves me oodles of time. :-)
  • @jay - but then i wouldn't exist!!!
  • rob
    @steve: sorry, it's orangejack.

    I need to add that one!
  • Steve,

    Doesn't sound hard at all to put together...

    Would you want this as an installable application on your PC, or would you want it as a "hosted service".

    If so, would you be happy to type your Twitter username / password into a managed service?

    Mark
  • Mark- I'm evidently not passing who I am and my password. What's the syntax for this?
  • From an Ubuntu shell:

    curl -u chrisbrogan:12345 "http://twitter.com/statuses/followers.xml?lite=true"

    Obviously, you'll need to replace "12345" with your own password (unless it IS your password, in which case insert "Spaceballs" quotes of your choice here).
  • Ah - that line wrapped - the entire thing, starting with 'curl' and ending with 'true"' should be on a single line in the terminal.
  • Mark,
    I'd use it as a hosted service and would enter in my username / password.
    --Steve
  • About 10 minutes ago, @dossy announced his Twitter Karma program. I asked him to add the ability to sort by people who were following me that I wasn't following, and vice versa, and he already updated it for me!

    http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

    So you could ignore all that bacn and just run this once a week and add anyone who is following you that you'd like to follow.
  • Marina, thanks for plugging Twitter Karma! :-)

    Chris, I'd like to hear how/if Twitter Karma helps you with your friend/follower management dilemma.

    I'll be adding the ability to follow/block folks from Twitter Karma in the next hour or so.
  • Actually Chris, it's as simple as opening a support ticket in Twitter Help, they can switch a variable in the database on your account to automatically follow anyone who follows you.

    They did it for me (took about 24 hours to get a response, not bad at all!) and now I don't have to worry about remembering and catching every 'follow' email that I get.
  • Does the fact you only started following me on twitter today indicate that you've found a solution :-)

    @MarkHarrisonUK
  • @MarkHarrisonUK - yes, but not the one you are helping me with.

    http://dossy.org/twitter/karma/

    That worked. : )
  • "3: If you do it this way, you can just write a mail rule that DELETES the BACN from Twitter :-)"

    FYI, you can go into Twitter settings and tell it not to email you when someone new follows you.
  • off-topic but I'm quite impressed that you're getting up to 60 followers a day on a text-only feed that offers neither nudity nor the promise of nudity.
  • My name is KATHAR MOIDEEN Indian citizen living in SHARJAH UAE. A man named Mohd Bin Al Hamrani Living in Sharjah UAE tied up with me a lease contract for his business for the period of one year at the rate of 13000 Dirham per month. After handing over the business to me Hamrani continually disturbing and interrupting the business he did what ever he things that he want to develop this business and put all the expenses on my head and made me great loss where I could not pay the agreement amount as agreed.

    Since I could not pay my obligations as per the agreement he don’t want to take back the business and pushing me in to great loss again and again.

    Now He is trying to put me in Jail based on the agreement where the total business gone on loss
    And I have to pay to him a big money.

    I am trying to convince him that I can pay this amount by installment in three or four years but he don’t want to accept it and he is always with me in aggressive way.
    Detailed information is in this page http://www.itsystemsconsultancy.com/


    Now I found no way to run out of it. Do not understand what I can do. But only way I have to kill my self.
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