SMSFind Who Unfollowed Or Ditched You On Twitter
Have you ever wondered these social networking sites do tell you - who befriend with you or who followed you recently, but they do not notify who removed you from their friend list or dumped you!
In the context of Twitter, this hide and seek game of followers count plays a pivotal role for:-
1. SPAMMERS - who follow you to gain your attention and then silently unfollow you as a trick to get visitor on the link on their profile or increase their followers.
2. POTENTIAL FOLLOWERS - Human psychology refrains a potential follower from following you noticing the Following:Follower ratio in your profile.
3. FOLLOWER WANNABE FRIEND - One follower asks you "hey, I noticed you are not following me back?". You do so to make him happy and get rid of his frequent requests. But, you are not interested in his talks and unfollow afterwards silently.
Now, how to know who are no longer following you?
If you have a so-so equal but small number of following and followers count, i.e. you follow most of your followers you can check your Twitter Karma and trace who is hiding from you. This works only if the total count is small and you have a sharp memory to notice the change.
How do you find a needle in a hay stack?
If you have a subsequently greater number of followers and let say 1/2 unfollowed you. In this case, Tweetake comes handy to backup a list of your followers in .CSV file format.
For the experiment, I used a dummy profile to follow few random people including my original profile and then unfollowed it.
The .CSV file has columns - type, id, name, screen name .etc. Edit this file in Microsoft Excel or Google Docs and delete all columns except the "id". Save this file and keep as archive. If you are using Google Docs, export the file as a .CSV.
When you notice decrease in followers count, import a new list, process i.e. delete the unwanted columns and save it as a new copy.
- Now, Download and install csvdiff, an open source tool to compare two .CSV files.
- Copy the old list from archive and the new list to the folder of installation.
- Goto Start -> Run and type cmd. Navigate to the folder of installation. Execute:- csvdiff -e old.csv -a new.csv > result.txt
- It compares the old and new lists and generates the report as result.txt file.
- Open the result.txt file to note the change i.e. expected data (old file) and actually data (new file).
- Copy the expected value (say XXXX) and open the link http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/XXXX.atom in your browser to get the feed of that profile.
TweepleTwak is another such service (currently in private alpha version) that solves the purpose.
Extending this idea, you can trace which orkut profile removed you from his friend list by importing your friendlist as .CSV and making a comparison between the email ids.
Interestingly, Facebook does not allow officially to import your contact list. But, it can be done using the apps - Fonebook and Friend CSV.
Now, if you liked this story retweet it! and reply @fundubytes - what will you do once you catch the runaway follower?
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