So I posted yesterday how to use the Twitter API but failed to mention my exact reason behind why I started messing with it in the first place. Quite simply it was because a friend I was following on Twitter wasn’t following me back. And I wondered who else wasn’t following me, the Twitter website was no real help as it only offers separate views of your friends and followers without any way to cross reference them. And after a little digging around I couldn’t find anything that did this, there was nothing in the Twitter clients I use, and the people I asked knew of nothing, and google was no help though granted the search terms I used are pretty ambiguous. So I decided to go about building my own.
Luckily the Twitter API is very easy to use and it didn’t take me long to have lists of both my friends and my followers, and once you have that the PHP array_diff() function takes care of the rest. In the space of a only few hours I had the whole thing up on my dev box and had hit up those wrongdoers who chose not to follow me demanding an explanation! People responded very well and explained that they’d run into this before and it was tough to keep track of your friends and followers on Twitter. Though it started as a joke it seemed I had ended up creating a way to visually display some Twitter information that until now had not been easily available.
In fact some of the feedback was so positive it was suggested that I make this available publicly, so I grabbed a domain name and setup a site for all to use. I cleaned up my code and made it production ready, and then proceeded to spend way more time than I had spent coding the whole thing to come up with a half decent design. I am no designer but luckily each users Twitter preferences are exposed by the API so I was able to use their background image and colors (this is a real bonus as it makes each results page visually unique).
As I talked about yesterday the API doesn’t allow for more than 100 queries an hour so I’ve had to add in some limitations, you can read more in the about section. But for the average Twitter user, as oppose to some celebrity super user with tens of thousands of followers, I think this is a simple enough tool that serves it’s specific purpose well. I guess just how useful it really is remains to be seen.
Anyways, without further ado I present to you www.BadTwitterFriends.com!
Oh and by the way, yes I am now being followed by the original offender!
