Why I cut 3,119 Non-Followers on Twitter and Feel the Better For It

As you may recall, there was a post here on DaddyClaxton.com 371 or so days ago was entitled: Why I cut 3,300 peeps from my @Twitter account and feel all the better for it. This year, I only cut 3,119, but it was time for a cleansing of the tweeps who I was following who either weren’t kind enough or who were too important in their own minds to be following me back. There was a smaller group, like of about 350 or so, whom I cut because they haven’t used Twitter like since the days of smoke signals.

It took me about three days again, but this year I had help. I used a couple of UnFollow Twitter sites. And using Firefox and a plug in that lets me check boxes on pages where the Twitter API no longer will allow programmers to build it into a page, I zapped roughly 1,500 peeps a day, by the categories mentioned above. The site I used for the purging was ManageFilter and I have to say, it worked really, really easy. Of course, I didn’t cut everyone it recommended, but it did clear a lot of fog. Because really, who wants to get a bunch tweets from someone you can’t really carry on a conversation with?

I used ManageFilter most of all because it didn’t cost me anything. I began with another site, Untweeps.com, and although they were kind enough to tell me of the Firefox plug-in Check-Fox, I couldn’t figure out how to use it. It’s sort of tricky, but it goes like this.

On a Mac, you hit Control+A at the same time you’re right clicking on your mouse. (I think it’s the same for a PC, but if you have a PC, you’re probably more worried about if it’s going to work in 10 minutes than the number of Twitter followers who aren’t following you.) This works on pages where there are check boxes for miles and you don’t have the patience or the extra hour or so of time to click down through say, 1,500 boxes. Because I didn’t know that Untweeps.com, would only cut 500 non-followers at a time, I wasted the time to highlight the 1,500 I wanted to get rid of, only to click delete and for it to tell me it had a limit. So, I wasted about an hour and a half time, total, and largely decided I was not happy. I then downloaded the Check-Fox add on for Firefox, logged back into Untweeps.com to use it, and then it said my three FREE attempts were all used up and I could pay $1.37 or some crazy-assed amount to use it for three days. I sent Untweeps.com‘s developer a Tweet saying how disappointed I was. His response was to get the Check-Fox add on. I decided for the time I’d already invested with them, there was no way I was going to pay $1.37.

Twitter 2011

Like last year, I want to commend Twitter for how it’s really worked to clean up the spammers and those tramps trying to sell sex sites.

But I also have to say that I’m not real crazy about their new layout. It’s frustrated me, and maybe that’s more so because I’m now 45, but here’ what I did last night that I didn’t want to do.

I sent a DM to someone I didn’t want to send a DM to. I clicked in the messages portion I guess at the top center of the new Twitter screen and sent them a message. Well, I was so tired when I sent it, and frustrated that I was having to use new Twitter that I didn’t realize until this morning that I’d sent the DM.

So, for those of you out there who might be struggling with the new Twitter to figure out how to send a DM to someone, you click the MESSAGE space at the top. Now the screen it takes you to to me feels like it’s a Timeline screen, and that’s where I made my error.

So, person who got a DM from me last night asking why you’ve not been on Twitter the past few days, I didn’t mean to do that, and I’m glad you replied this morning to one of my normal tweets to you. Like I promised when you began following me, I plan to continue to be judicial in how I send DMs to you, as the last thing I want to happen, is for you to unfollow me.