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See Which Twitterers Don’t Follow You Back In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby

Posted: May 12th, 2009 | Author: Jerod | Filed under: Ruby | Tags: , | View Comments

The asynchronous nature of Twitter is one of its keys to success. No friend requests. Awesome.

A lot of the people I follow on Twitter have no business following me. I did’t get upset when DHH, _why, and alexalbrecht did not reciprocate interest. Why would they? They don’t know me from Adam (even though I’m waayyy cooler than that dude…).

However, sometimes it is interesting to see all the jerks people who you follow that do not follow you back. There’s probably a web application out there that does this, but who needs a web app when this is a perfectly good excuse to play with Ruby?

The twitter gem by John Nunemaker makes this task so easy it’s retarded. First, get the gem if you don’t already have it:

sudo gem install twitter

Now. The script:

Isn’t that simple? Are you with me on the retarded comment now? How it works:

The ‘friend_ids‘ and ‘follower_ids‘ methods each return an array of ids and we subtract the followers array from the friends array. All that is left over after subtraction are the ids of users in your friends list (people you follow) that are not in your followers list. Then we loop over the new array of “guilty” parties and fetch their user account information based on their user_id, printing the details each time.

Just replace ‘username’ and ‘password’ with your own information and you’re off to the races. Run the script from your command line and you should see output similar to this:

no_follows

NOTE: Twitter only allows (currently) 100 API requests per hour. Each user account lookup requires an API request, so if your “guilty” array is quite large, you’ll probably get an error before the script terminates (Maybe its time to un-follow a few peeps!).

What other cool tricks can we do using the Twitter gem?

View Comments on “See Which Twitterers Don’t Follow You Back In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby”

  1. 1 Bryan Roth said at 6:44 am on May 13th, 2009:

    Nice! I'm relatively new to Ruby so this is a nice little treat. Thanks for posting this!

  2. 2 Joe Zack said at 6:52 am on May 13th, 2009:

    I wanted to write a little script using this library that would sniff out people I ought to follow, based on who my friends follow. But the 100 API requests per hour is a bummer.

  3. 3 sant0sk1 said at 6:58 am on May 13th, 2009:

    That could be a fun project.

    What you could do is limit the API requests by sleeping the script for awhile so that you don't overuse the hourly limit. It wouldn't take too many requests to have a list of user_ids that all your friends follow. Then you could cross-reference them and identify accounts that overlap.

  4. 4 Daniel Hepper said at 7:49 am on May 13th, 2009:

    Nice little script!

    Keep in mind that if you have lots of followers and friends (think aplusk), you will run out of API requests before you even fetched all ids.

  5. 5 khelll said at 9:25 am on May 13th, 2009:

    cool!

  6. 6 oriste said at 9:46 am on May 13th, 2009:

    Nifty!

  7. 7 dziegler said at 5:08 pm on May 13th, 2009:

    Very cool. My Python version was 14 ;)
    http://blog.davidziegler.net/post/107429458/see...

  8. 8 Zen»Blog Archive » See Which Twitterers Don’t Follow You Back (and vice-versa) In Less Than 15 Lines of…Perl said at 8:42 pm on May 13th, 2009:

    [...] idea was recently demonstrated in Ruby and was neatly done in 15 lines or less(you might have noticed something familiar about my post [...]

  9. 9 Jasperiel said at 12:35 am on May 14th, 2009:

    puts guilty.map { |user_id| user = base.user(user_id)
    “#{user.name} follows #{user.friends_count} and has #{user.followers_count} followers.”}.join(“n”)}

    Gain two lines by using the much underused “map” iterator.
    Why are most Rubyists neglecting “map” so much ? :(

    Gain one more if you don't declare “guilty” and inline (base.friend_ids – base.follower_ids) before the “map”.
    But this would require to put the counting line after and using “_”, which is quite ugly and less readable.

  10. 10 sant0sk1 said at 5:39 am on May 14th, 2009:

    Thanks for the input! I do use map a lot but I wasn't going for absolute minimum LOC. It was more of a “look how easy it is” script, so brevity & readability were key.

    Still, I agree that map if very cool.

  11. 11 Trouver des followers communs sur Twitter en Ruby « 29 minutes par jour : un blog anti-procrastination said at 11:32 am on May 14th, 2009:

    [...] quelqu’un.” Hey, un challenge! J’avais justement vu un post la veille pour voir les gens que tu follow mais qui ne te followent pas. C’est en Ruby aussi et ça utilise la gem [...]

  12. 12 好妙的創業模式！創業家硬將Twitter扯上男女交友、人力銀行、域名購買等「大題目」 | TechNow 當 said at 8:03 pm on May 14th, 2009:

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  13. 13 Dinesh said at 9:53 pm on May 14th, 2009:

    nice script
    Love that

  14. 14 lowell said at 11:26 pm on May 14th, 2009:

    you can ask to get white listed: http://twitter.com/help/request_whitelisting

  15. 15 Twitted by iamkhayyam said at 11:27 pm on May 14th, 2009:

    [...] This post was Twitted by iamkhayyam – Real-url.org [...]

  16. 16 BlogMouth » Twitter Tweet Links May 2009 said at 11:59 am on May 31st, 2009:

    [...] See Which Twitterers Don’t Follow You Back In Less Than 15 Lines of Ruby [...]

  17. 17 Mark SMith said at 9:42 am on October 13th, 2009:

    Great Read

  18. 18 Mark SMith said at 4:42 pm on October 13th, 2009:

    Great Read

  19. 19 Twitter Ruby UnFollow Code | Havadan Sudan Bir Blog said at 6:18 am on January 23rd, 2010:

    [...] Orginal code only lists people which are not following you. http://blog.jerodsanto.net/2009/05/see-which-twitterers-dont-follow-youback-in-less-than-15-lines-of... [...]

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