TweetEffect – find out when people followed or left you on Twitter
I’ve just finished uploading and fixing TweetEffect a web app that allows you to check which of your latest http://twitter.com updates resulted in people following or leaving you:
With the demise of Qwitter there was no real update mechanism to know when you lost followers, this might be a step to fill this gap. TweetEffect does not tell you who left you, only the number of people. The reason is the draconic rate limiting of Twitter. This is also the reason why the app largely runs in JavaScript and only does checks server-side when you provide a user ID on the URL. This allows for bookmarking and sharing with others.
Check out some examples:
What do you think? Anything else to add?
Tags: analysis, followers, mashup, statistics, tweeteffect, twitter, unfollowers, webapp
January 17th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Cool idea. Another site is Twitterless.com which does a bunch of follower tracking, including when people stop following you.
January 17th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Seems to work nicely for random accounts I check, but the detailed report for my own account (@locusmeus) claims that I’ve always had 16 followers, right from the beginning, no ups or downs. In reality, I started with 0 followers, and it’s been going up gradually since then, with 3 or 4 people unfollowing me along the way. Does the script work for people who’ve had less than 200 tweets?
January 17th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
@Els, yes it does. I am not getting any magical data here, all I am using is what twitter gives me, in your case this data. Seems like there is a lag in the API to get changes.
January 17th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
I see. Wonder where twittercounter get their data from? Are there different APIs?
http://twittercounter.com/?username=locusmeus&chart=all
January 17th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Never mind – just figured that one out I think; it seems they don’t use the API for the history, but just track today’s via the API and accumulate their own data.