The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

TweepSync is now twice as awesome

Posted on October 8, 2009.

I've just doubled the usefulness of TweepSync, the Twitter tool I launched last week. You can now use TweepSync to see all the people who are following you that you are not following and choose which ones you want to follow. Adding this to the original feature, which allows you to see who you are following that is not following you back, means that TweepSync now covers the full spectrum of methods for making sure that your Twitter friends and followers lists are in sync. You can use it to effectively ensure that users you are following match the users that are following you and keep the Twitter "conversation" clean.

I think it's worth mentioning that I built TweepSync because I needed a tool that would allow me to manage my Twitter friends & followers in this way, and I couldn't find a single good tool already available. The closest options I could find were Twitter Karma, which never worked, and TweeMaid, which charges $15.95 for a service I knew I could build in a day. Furthermore, neither of these services offer the feature I just launched (follow those who are following you). This means that TweepSync is the only tool that truly allows you to sync your Twitter friends and followers in just a few simple steps. I know that sounds like a wild claim to make, but it's the truth and you can believe me when I say that I now use TweepSync multiple times a week to help me keep my friends and followers in check. It's one of my primary tools in my "Twitter toolbox" that I use to improve my presence on Twitter.

So I hope you'll try TweepSync if you haven't already. If you like it, please share it with your friends so that I can build more tools for Twitter power users. If you have any feedback or questions, post them in the comments and I'll respond ASAP. Every little bit helps!

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2 Comments

1. naum on October 8, 2009

   Seems to be a bug with paging through followers I am not following, subsequent pages (after first page) show me those following who are not following me…

   Really nifty utility, one that I pondered writing myself, though curious how to achieve this without busting API rate caps.

   One gripe about UI — BLAM! or FOLLOW! button might be better rephrased and more essentially, seems like a lot of clicking to go through (2 clicks per page) to go through hundreds of entries.

2. Christian Montoya on October 8, 2009

   naum: On the first part, you found a major bug! I've fixed it (it was just a tiny bad link) and everything works fine now.

   As for the 2 clicks per page, and the large number of pages, this was for a couple of reasons:

   • The effect of following or unfollowing is serious and hard to reverse, so I offer a very clear confirmation that allows the user to review the changes they've made and fix any mistakes they may have made (by being able to visit user's Twitter profiles).
   • The 20 users at a time restriction allows me to handle the large amount of data I have to pull from the API in a reasonable way and helps to prevent from going over the API rate limit (along with lots of caching).

   Basically, the way I've paged it was essential to ensure that this would even be possible… and for those who have more than 5,000 followers, TweepSync won't even try to handle their lists… it just quits.

   But let's think about it this way… the decision you have to make about a user is a decision you only have to make once… so if it takes 10 minutes to prune a list of hundreds of people that you want to remove from your "friends," it's something you will only have to do once and this is the cleanest way to do it!