Twit Cleaner: Tidy your Twitter following

Not every person you follow on Twitter is worth your attention. Some flakes are easy to spot: the egg-shaped avatar; the auto-bot reply when you follow someone, the dodgy spam-like tweets.

The trouble is, once your follow list grows beyond a few hundred, sorting the wheat from chaff becomes harder. Twit Cleaner is a New Zealand-developed application which automates the process.

Using the service is as simple as opening the web site and entering your Twitter address. A few minutes later you’ll get a Twitter direct message with a link to a page showing people you might want to unfollow.

Clearing out the junk

When I first tried Twit Cleaner I was following more than 1000 Twitter accounts. A message at the top of the Twit Cleaner screen told me I around 170 of those accounts were potentially garbage. I didn’t agree with all the named people, but quickly culled the 30 or so most annoying accounts. More will follow.

Twit Cleaner divides the potentially bad accounts into seven categories:

Potentially dodgy behaviour are accounts which mainly post links. You might want to keep some of these if they are news feeds, but individual accounts like this are often worth unfollowing.

Posting the same tweet too many times.

App spam means messages mainly come from those annoying services like 4square which tell you someone is now mayor of simpleton.

Other dodgy behaviour, now absent applies to accounts where people have been a bit silly but have stopped tweeting.

No activity in over a month is self-explanatory. In some cases these are people just taking a breather. I deleted anyone who hadn’t tweeted for 90 days.

Not much interaction is when people just pump out a feed and don’t chat or otherwise engage. Often robots run these accounts.

Hardly follows anyone is people who follow back fewer than 10% of the people following them. In other words, they not giving with their Twitter activity.

All talk, all the time are accounts which are possibly too noisy.

Little original content applies to people who mainly retweet others.

Not so interesting are self-obsessed Twitter users who mainly tweet about themselves.

Relatively unpopular applies to Twitter users who hardly anyone follows back. I suspect some of these are just not trying hard.  

Now we need a Twit Cleaner for Facebook and Linkedin.