Qwitter: Making every tweet count
As of late, a lot of Twitter add-on sites have been popping up. Whether it’s just coincidence, or because third-party Summize was acquired by Twitter, there are suddenly many ways to spice up your Twitter life.
One such web application is Qwitter [Note: not Qwitter, the site dedicated to smokers hoping to quit]. Launched last week, the basic premise of the service is to inform when people stop following you. The particular tweet that made them “qwit” you is also cited.
I tried out Qwitter for a few days, and I have to say, it was a little depressing. The fact that Skurfiss stopped following my tweets after I nicely said good night was strange, and made me wonder why. I was just being polite and wishing him and all my Twitter friends good night, after all! Does that truly offend anyone?
Plus, I don’t really know Mr. Skurfiss in real life so I am not all that broken up about it. If it was a “real” and not “virtual” friend, I think I would be slightly offended.
The real question behind this all is, what makes a single tweet worthy enough to stop following someone? Sure, I have un-followed fellow twitterers but that decision is mostly based on the frequency of tweets and the content. It can get annoying with Woot.com is holding a Woot-off and that is all you see for pages and pages. Hence, being unfollowed by @nehalia.
Qwitter is a fun service to try and I think that it may be enjoyable for some of the more controversial or polar Twitter profiles. Some interesting features to add would be a chart monitoring your losses for the week, a scoreboard for the most un-followed person, and perhaps a public posting of the most un-followed tweet ever. I would suggest that Twitter users should try it out, but for a middle of the road user like me, it was nothing but heartbreak [kidding--it's just Twitter!]
Nice write up. The emotional response we’ve gotten from people using Qwitter has been amazing for an app that we made just because we could. I compare it to a scary movie — it’s certainly an emotional journey, and it’s definitely not for everyone!
Good post, twitterless.com also serves the same purpose,but frankly I can’t convince myself about having a site for something which should exist in twitter inherently.
As a glutton for punishment myself, I signed up immediately for my personal Twitter account and my job’s Twitter account that I manage.
I can totally take the emotional toll, the need to know trumps any emotional scarring that may result!
You left out the part where they fail miserably because of the way they’ve designed the back-end combined with the Twitter API limitations. Because it’s, in my opinion (and apparently theirs, which is good), completely out of the question to store a users Twitter password, they aren’t doing so. This means that they aren’t able to use your Twitter account to make API requests to check up on your followers periodically, they have to use their own (probably the @qwitter acct and/or a couple “bot accounts” they’ve created). On top of that, you can only pull a single page of 100 followers at a time via Twitters API, and you only get 70 API requests per hour (there’s some confusion as to whether this is 70 or 100 requests per hour, and I still don’t know the answer to that one).
When you think about the fact that they’re using at *most* a few “bot accounts” they’ve created to do the polling, combined with the number of followers many people have, this becomes basically impossible (100 followers per page X 70 requests per hour = 7,000 max — and that doesn’t account for other calls they probably have to make to take action, such as pulling your last tweet to report that). Think about a person like @kevinrose, for example, with (last I checked) 66,000+ followers. What if someone dropped off but is waaayyy in the back on the last page of followers? All the Qwitter requests would get used up before it even found the follower that quit… not to mention all the requests would be used up for everyone else as well, since we’re not using “our own” accounts to place requests.
Problem is, if you make it so you have to log in to Qwitter every time, the service is useless because you’d have to stay logged in to get any hope of actually catching someone unfollow you (and for those with more than 7k followers, it would be useless altogether).
On top of all that, there is nothing guaranteeing the tweet reported by Qwitter is the one that caused people to drop off. Since Qwitter has to be polling periodically (it doesn’t just “know” when someone stops following you) it can only know what tweets you’ve posted between the last time it checked your account and now. Going under the assumption that since the last time your account was checked you have indeed lost a follower, there’s nothing that says they left because of your latest tweet, and not one of the 2 or 3 or 10 before that (but after the last time your account was checked).
I’m not saying the service is a bad idea, or even poorly executed (given the circumstances). I’d love to see something like this that actually works, but the Twitter API restrictions just will not allow for a service like this to function/thrive at the moment.
Thanks to Qwitter now I know the amount of time people can tolerate me. I can track when someone starts following to when they unfollow.
So far you lead with the highest amount of time tolerating my tweets
@Mark — We actually have whitelist API status … You’d be suprised by the number of concurrent requests + polltimes we achieve! There are still a few bugs in the system, but your numbers are way off.
Paul
I may be wrong on this, but skurfiss may have stopped following you when he changed his twitter handle to kurf. You remember what it’s like to change your Twitter name & the unintended consequences it can bring?
So the question is, is kurf a follower? If so, this may point out a potential quirk of qwitter.
@Paul well that does change things a bit, doesn’t it?
I can only assume though, that most of the rest of my logic still applies, but please do correct me if I’m wrong. I’d love to pick your brain about a couple things if you’d care to take this conversation offline? http://twitter.com/markrebec