13 November 2012

Pruning old Twitter users

What’s the best way to do a Twitter clean-up of who you follow? Need to remove dups/junk accounts/dead accts, etc.

— Prashant Shukla (@PShukla8) November 12, 2012

This seemed like an interesting and inexplicably neglected issue to me. How do people prune whom they follow? You’re in a bit of a catch-22 since you regularly see people who are active, but inactive people are rarely seen.

I’ve been thinking about it, and it can’t be too hard to put something together that would work for a user’s needs. There could be an adjustable threshold where you say “if the person hasn’t tweeted in x days, show them in the list”. Even more, this could display those users’ last tweet (or few tweets), just in case they’re sporadic users of Twitter but still tweet stuff you’re interested in consistently.

I wonder how Twitter’s new API guidelines will deal with this, but I suspect this won’t be such a big deal. I’m such an obscure person I’ll be shocked if I reach 100k users, heh.

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