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
  end

auth = 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

It looks like Twitter is making lots of little changes on their site.

They’ve added new colorful default profile images,  rolled out some design tweaks and now they allow the @ symbol in URLs.

Previously if you tried twitter.com/@boctor or twitter.com/@tweetslounge you’d get an error. But now that link works just fine.

Handy for those times you’re copying and pasting and accidentally keep the  symbol

A welcome change from the brown!

If you’ve used Twitter at all you’ve seen the original default profile image that Twitter assigns you when you first join:

Now it looks like along with their home page redesign they have a set of new images. It appears that the colors are randomly assigned:

A welcome change from the brown!

I’m happy to announce my new side project: Tweets Lounge.

Tweets Lounge is a directory of local neighborhood businesses using Twitter. It’s like a Yelp directory for Twitter.

We’re initially supporting Seattle and the surrounding area, but we plan on expanding to other cities soon. Check out the site: http://tweetslounge.com and follow us at @TweetsLounge.