When you have a relatively small number of followers on Twitter, it’s easy to keep track of whether you’re following them or not and vice versa. But when I checked my Twitter profile earlier today, I discovered that I had 765 followers - and I was following 910 people. Now obviously there’s a big discrepancy there. It seems that not everyone that I follow is returning the favour and I’m sure that when some people follow me, I’m forgetting to hit that “follow” button too. It happens sometimes.
But with so many names on the profile, how do you distinguish between mutual followers and people who are not sharing the love? You can’t check each one individually - that is just too tedious and mind-numbingly boring. Enter FriendOrFollow which will quickly do the checking for you and filter out the bad people who are not following you. It will even tell you the poor souls who are following you but you are not following them. Bad you!
The nice thing about this webpage is that it doesn’t ask you for your Twitter password. I am always a bit hesitant about anything that asks for my password but FriendOrFollow doesn’t ask for anything like th
at. All it needs is your Twitter username. Then while it gets to work sorting and sifting, you get an animated GIF picture of a cute bunny rabbit getting its head stroked! AWW!
Once it brings up who’s not following you back, you can then decide if you want to unsubscribe from them or not. I suppose it all depends on your personal philosophy of what Twitter is all about. I personally believe that Twitter only works if you’re having a two-way conversation and THAT only happens if both people are following one another. So I tend to unfollow anyone who doesn’t follow me back. Other people approach Twitter differently with different viewpoints but that’s my own personal take on it. So when FriendOrFollow says “here are the people who are not following you”, I instinctively unfollow most of them, except for some Twitter bots that I use, such as the news, MakeUseOf, parcel tracker etc.
But then the tedious work starts - individually unsubscribing from each one! It would be nice if there was a one click batch unsubscribe feature! Yeah I know, I’m a lazy sod. Pass me another cream cake. Oh and the TV remote control. Thanks.
Oh and don’t forget to follow MakeUseOf on Twitter.
(By) Mark O'Neill is a freelance blogger and professional writer. He is also the managing and publishing editor of MakeUseOf. Check out his personal blog at Better Than Therapy
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Filed Under: Cool Websites
Tags: microblogging, Twitter
I don’t see my smiling face on your Twitter list but I know I am following you. Good article. I signed up for FriendOrFollow. It looks like a good app for Twitter. Thanks!
I hate to say it but I like to keep my Twitter managable. I read every single tweet if I can so I only subscribe to people who post stuff I want to read. Having the entire internet flowing into my Twitter client does me no good. For this reason I only return-follow people if I actually want to see them on my feed.
Thanks for the article. I love Twitter and everything that has to do with it.
Regards from Santiago, Chile.