Why is this useful? I'm intrigued. Would you then start unfollowing people who haven't followed you? Either you want to know what they're tweeting or you don't. Why does it matter if it's a one way street?

Some of the Twitter stuff I just don't get. People following everyone who follows them (Out of etiquette?), but then using a twitter client that allows them to ignore all the tweets from them??? It makes no sense!!! Waste of bandwidth, resources etc.

IMHO Twitter should have a limit on the number of people you can follow. Maybe 50 max. I don't see how you can follow more than that and it be useful. Past that you may as well just check the public updates or do searches for specific things surely. That would be just slightly more efficient than everyone following thousands, then filtering in their twitter client, which seems to be what happens atm.

</twrant>

Sometimes Twitter can be used to try and build a relationship or get the interest of someone. If such an attempt fails over time, you might choose to cut your losses. Yes, it might be sad and cynical, but people act this way. Hey, I do it.

Also, sometimes you follow people who you eventually find a bit boring, but your manners might dictate that you don't unfollow them if they're still following you. Likewise.

>> "Also, sometimes you follow people who you eventually find a bit boring, but your manners might dictate that you don't unfollow them if they're still following you."

Seems like that's a shame - I think it'd be great if each time someone tweeted something boring, their follow count dropped 10%. They might improve the quality of their tweets then.

> They might improve the quality of their tweets then.

The problem is that quality is relative to who is reading your tweets. There is at least one service like this. It doesn't really improve anything. People who use it just become self-censoring and clam up. Also by self-censoring based on who unfollows, you change your behavior too late.

Depending on what you use twitter for, yes, it's etiquette, which basically means mutual masturbation. You follow them, they follow you, so both your counts go up and you get more "popular", which may matter if your account is basically just another PR angle, or if you're so self involved you believe the world is interested in you live-tweeting your lunch at McDonald's.

It's not how many people you follow, it's how many tweets they produce. If you follow 500 people who tweet on average once every couple of days, that's 250 tweets per day. I'm sure you read more than that on HN. Or you could fill up your daily attention quota with a few accounts like scobleizer, techcrunch, jasoncalacanis, etc.

Good point, but it's also the selection criteria that makes little sense to me. I can understand people actually thinking "Ah Stephen Fry says some witty things, I think I'll follow him". I can understand that - being interested in a specific 'celeb'.

But when you're following 500, how have you decided that each one is useful/valuable. How can you be interested in "everything" that "500 people" say? Surely at that sort of stage it's better to be interested in particular subjects/keywords/hashtags rather than people.

I don't think I'll ever understand TBH.

You don't have to be interested in everything they say. Twitter is asynchronous. These are people who may say something potentially interesting when you are online, and you may answer at that point.

One way to see it is that you are creating your own irc channel with 500 people that you choose.

There may be reasons to be interested in everything 500 people say. They could be your employees and you want to make sure you record everything they tweet. They could be your customers. There are many use cases out there that we can't think of.

I wrote it more as a fun example of the stuff you can do with very little Ruby (when relying on the proper libraries).

No doubt it's cool in terms of code, I was just intrigued about the whole twitter culture :)

I think it's the dynamic of very loose relationships. And if I have to read your drivel, you better be reading mine.

This is crap.

It stops being a "fun example of the stuff you can do with very little Ruby" as soon as it performs some function with social ramifications. Code does not exist in a moral vacuum.

The fact of the matter is that people do use scripts like this to game the system, which inflates the meaningful currency with which a given community operates, ultimately devaluing and undermining that community.

Scripts like this contribute to Twitter going the way of MySpace.

You seem to be under the delusion that the number of followers/following have some real meaning/value.

You are saying that this code is immoral? You're gonna have to back that up.

As a Ruby developer, awesome.

As a Twitter user, I just use http://friendorfollow.com/ - takes seconds :)

Hah, I figured somebody had gone there before. Just didn't know who!

It's pretty remarkable how fast their system is, too. I'm not sure how they do it, but they come up with a list for me within seconds. I compared against that produced by your code and it was all right too.

This seems a bit unhealthy.

Whoops I linked to the "more" section instead of the direct permalink. You'll have to scroll up to read the whole post. Sorry.

Am new to this but:

    join <(twidge lsfollowing | sort) <(twidge lsfollowers | sort) -v 1

I honestly don't see the point of this particular script, apart from giving twitter-spammers stats on what is good bait and what is not.

But I guess it goes to show that there is a Ruby twitter-API out there and provides a quick how-to code-nugget as a starting point.

Flagged.