I've been keeping an eye on current best practices on Twitter (of course), & it appears Twitter is cracking down on bulk unfollow. This was an informative article, & an eye opening tweet.

Specifically, they want to avoid churning - that is, following a ton of people, then unfollowing those that don't follow back, repeat ad nauseum. I suspect part of their motivation is to limit spammy behaviour, & part is that it's a massive drain on their servers (getting hit with thousands of API requests in a short period of time).

I realise that with The Twit Cleaner, we skirting a fine line. However, my priority is to keep your accounts safe, operate within the guidelines of Twitter, while improving the quality of experience for everyone.

In short: I want to improve the Twitter experience as much as I possibly can - but without pissing Twitter off (or causing them any hassle) in the process. I've been very careful to try & ensure that the service is the least possible use to those I'm trying to rid Twitter of - those engaging in churn or other spammy practices. Ie, there's a lot of things I could have put in, but I deliberately haven't because of any possibility of abuse.

Of course if Twitter says jump, the only appropriate response is "how high", but I believe we're safe because:

1. You only ever have the option to unfollow people that are bad Twitter citizens in the first place - typically a very small percentage of anyone's account
2. We do the unfollowing very, very slowly (only one every few seconds) to limit drain on Twitter's servers
3. We never unfollow more than a small percent of your account per day, no matter how many you request.

To this end, I have slowed the unfollow down even further than before. It will now not unfollow more than 20% 10% 5% (or 500, whichever is smaller) of your friend count per day, as well as spacing each unfollow out much, much more slowly.

Ergo, if you want to use The Twit Cleaner to empty your account, you're better off going somewhere else (it's not something I'd recommend anyway). If you want to use it to trim out spammers & time wasters of course, we're the guys for you.

It'll still happen, just very, VERY slowly. Don't hold your breath :)

I've always been a huge fan of Apple products. Why? Because of their simplicity.

It takes a lot of work to get something that clean yet still intuitive.

I've always believed that the reason we have computers is to make things simpler for us. We shouldn't be burning our own cycles if we can get the machine to do it for us.

Now, I'm the first to admit that The Twit Cleaner is nowhere near that level of elegance yet, but it's an iterative process, & a high goal. I'll keep pushing towards that.

In the meantime, I've simplified the pricing.

Now, things are like this: All reports are free, as always. If you follow fewer than 2000 people, we'll auto-unfollow whoever you want for free. If you follow more than 2000 people, it's five bucks.

Yep, Five US Dollars ($5) to clean your list.

It's hard to get cleaner & simpler than that.

[Edit: Ok, that pricing has been in place for a week or so, & some interesting things have happened. For example, I had two users in the space of half an hour, each with 60k+ lists. Given that creating a report for a list of that size involves downloading many gigabytes of data & 6-12 hours of processing, I started to think "Is it really worth doing all that work, for five measly bucks?" This is even more the case when not everybody that requests a report pays, of course.

Even a list that is 20,000 people basically takes ten times as long as a 2,000 list - due to getting the lists from Twitter, downloading the data, & running the analysis. There are no real economies of scale.

So, I've adjusted the pricing (again). I still like the $5 mark, & for most people, that'll still be it. For the whales though? Above 25k users is $10, & above 50k is $20. It's still not a hell of a lot, but I feel it's a better reflection of the costs & effort involved.

We'll see how long this pricing sticks for. Everything is a work in progress, & over time I'm sure things will settle down.]