Thanks to a tip on twitter from L Stephen Cleary who mentioned that I should check out ManageTwitter.com which is a twitter tool that lets you process and cleanup who your following on Twitter. The tool itself makes many API calls to collect information about all of your followers, so if you don’t have many API calls left or you have tens of thousands of people you are following, you will get an error when signing in that there are not enough API calls to query all of the people you are following with your twitter account.
Once you get into the system if it can handle your twitter profile you are presented with a wide range of options which include being able to see accounts that are inactive (haven’t tweeted in 30 days), Talkative, Quiet (tweet only 1x per day or less) and more. The tool can process and unfollow up to 100 accounts at a time and has Select All buttons currently. Now, this select all is a violation of Twitters ToS and it won’t be long before the application developer will have to remove it. In fact, I didn’t push how many API calls per day this application can actually make, but the application could be violating Twitter Terms of Service multiple times so I don’t know how long it will exist in its current state.
It isn’t instantaneous, but it does work fairly well and quickly. I was able to unfollow hundreds of inactive accounts that haven’t tweeted in 30 days or more with only 3 clicks. So this tool is highly recommended for cleaning up inactive accounts from your “following list” as well as if you just want to stop following people who aren’t reciprocating so you can follow others (in case you reach your following cap). The tool does give you the ability to deselect “verified” accounts so that you can make sure you still follow celebrities and major company accounts on twitter when doing bulk unfollowing which is a plus.
The JustUnfollow tool is simpler, and allows you to unfollow individual accounts more easily. It also makes far fewer API calls because it only grabs the first X amount of accounts, and only processes more as you click “See More”.
I think the ManageTwitter.com tool is useful for doing bulk unfollows, but it will not stay in its current form for much longer due to violating the Twitter ToS. I would suggest you make use of the tool quickly to cleanup your following list before you have to start manually unfollowing users one at a time again.
-Dragon Blogger