Auto-Follow Those that Follow you on Twitter
Hi - you seem to be new here. Please subscribe to my RSS feed to get the latest social news and information!
Please follow me on Twitter, Facebook, or FriendFeed to see what I'm up to. Thanks for visiting!
On Twitter, it is generally polite to follow those that follow you - they are saying, “you are interesting”, so it is the polite thing to show interest in them as well. I have heard from multiple people, including Scoble and Chris Pirillo that they have requested Twitter do this for them.
Well, I’m proud to announce that I’ve written a script that does just this for you. It’s a simple script, that does just what it says it does - auto-follows those that follow you. To install the script, download this script, unzip it (gunzip), then edit it. You’ll need to specify your Twitter username and password in the specified places, and if you want to blacklist any screen-names you’ll want to add those in as well. Then, add the script to a cron job somewhere, say, in cron.hourly or cron.daily, and it will now auto-follow anyone that follows you on Twitter! If you get any bologna (as I call it - others call it bacon) followers, you can simply add them to your black list in the script and it will ignore them.
If you have any problems installing it or running it, please comment. This script is being released under the GPL, v.1. Again, you can download the script at:
http://www.jessestay.com/auto_follow.pl.gz
I’ll post it to CPAN later as I get time so it can be downloaded there.
UPDATE: you’ll need to have Net::Twitter installed - you can install this by running “perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Net::Twitter’”
UPDATE (11/14/2007): Chris Pirillo has pointed out that it’s hitting an API limit if you have to follow more than 70 users within the same hour. If that is the case, set it to run on cron every hour, and eventually it should catch up. Twitter can also add your username to a white list if this is important to you and contact them. If you are on that white list, it should follow everyone in one swoop.
November 14th, 2007 at 5:07 pm
[…] Try to say that 3 times fast. Jesse has released a perl script that will let you auto-follow anyone who’s following you on Twitter. Pretty cool little tool. Seems there are more than a few requests to have Twitter automatically do this. Go grab the script. […]
November 14th, 2007 at 9:35 pm
Can’t locate Net/Twitter.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /etc/perl /usr/local/lib/perl/5.8.8 /usr/local/share/perl/5.8.8 /usr/lib/perl5 /usr/share/perl5 /usr/lib/perl/5.8 /usr/share/perl/5.8 /usr/local/lib/site_perl .) at ./auto_follow.pl line 3.
BEGIN failed–compilation aborted at ./auto_follow.pl line 3.
November 14th, 2007 at 11:06 pm
Chris, you need to install Net::Twitter for perl. You can do that by entering the command above:
perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Net::Twitter’
Please feel free to comment or e-mail me if you have any more issues.
November 19th, 2007 at 1:06 am
[…] Jesse Stay write Auto-Follow Those that Follow you on Twitter […]
January 4th, 2008 at 5:07 am
[…] I was testing my auto follow script for Twitter and helping Chris Pirillo (see the comments in the link above) get his set up, I […]
January 4th, 2008 at 6:34 am
Giving people the benefit of the doubt makes a ton of sense.
I know I’m more willing to listen to folks who follow me. Folks that one way twitter are terribly frustrating. (as are people who try to spam 4,000+ people) When Guy Kawasaki finally decided to follow me after a month or two of not doing so, I know I’m going to be visiting his blog much more often.
Hat tip and props to Creative Sage for bringing me over to this post from Twitter.
March 10th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I think your download link may be down. I’m really looking forward to seeing how this is accomplished. thanks for your contribution, and best of luck with your projects.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Eli, try it again. You might also want to try socialtoo.com - I take all of the hard work out of it for you by doing it all for you there.
March 10th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Hey Jesse - Thanks for the quick response!
I was able to grab the download this time, but as per your socialtoo.com, that site seems to be down instead.
(en) Please come back later
(fr) SVP veuillez revenir plus tard
(de) Bitte versuchen sie es spaeter nocheinmal
(at) Konnten’s bitt’schoen spaeter nochmal reinschauen
(no) Vennligst prov igjen senere
(dk) Venligst prov igen senere
(pl) Prosze sprobowac pozniej
March 11th, 2008 at 12:13 am
sorry - there’s a bug there - you have to go to http://www.socialtoo.com (notice the www). I’ll get that fixed soon…
June 13th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
OK, I must be an idiot. I installed Net::Twitter and I get a install OK on that. When I drag the auto_follow.pl in to my terminal I get a ‘command not found’ with it (using sudo as well). What am I missing here? It has to be something simple.
June 13th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Benjamin, unless you’re set on running it on your own computer, I suggest just signing up for SocialToo.com - I’ve implemented it on a multi-user scale there and you can also blacklist users and do other stuff, including stuff on Facebook. If you like it, tell your friends about it!
June 17th, 2008 at 5:11 am
[…] thing to do. If you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty with some code then you could use this script to automate the process or if coding scares the bejesus out of you, then you could always just ask […]
July 16th, 2008 at 11:02 am
www poquer…
Yet winning at video poker ringtones verizon wireless sprint ringtones online casino slots gambling free alltel music ringtones…