Did you know that it’s possible to remove someone from your followers without blocking them?
Normally when you visit your list of followers these are the options available to you:
But after you protect your twitter account and mark it private, the options change to include the remove option:
Selecting “Remove” shows this alert and after you click OK, poof that user is no longer following you:
This nifty option is also available from the API, though it is undocumented:
curl -u user:password -d ” http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/59648642.xml
Here is a patch to John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem that adds this functionality:
module Twitter
class Base
def friendship_remove(id)
perform_post(”/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
end
end
And here is a quick Ruby Script that removes all the followers of a user:
#!/usr/bin/ruby -rubygems
require ‘twitter’module Twitter
class Base
def friendship_remove(id)
perform_post(”/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
end
endauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(’user’, ‘password’)
twitter = Twitter::Base.new(auth)twitter.follower_ids.each do |follower_id|
begin
twitter.friendship_remove(follower_id)
rescue => err
puts “#{err} for follower #{follower_id}”
next
end
end
