Comments on: A Python script to auto-follow all Twitter followers

By: codewolf

codewolf — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 11:15:41 +0000

This article inspired me to build my own. So I’ve made a more complete example in PHP if anyone needs a copy without having to pound the Twitter API with thousands of requests. My PHP version should only hit the API about 4 API uses an hour and it runs on a cron.

Please feel free to port it to python if you want. The script Logs all your followers in a mysql database and welcomes them with an optional msg when it auto follows them.

http://geekified.cable.nu/groups/codewolfscorner/discussion/autofollowyourtwitterfollowerswithphp

I hope it helps! Thanks again!
@CodeWolf

By: Get Me Followers

Get Me Followers — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:04:51 +0000

I’m sure it would be just as easy for Twitter to set it so that you could automatically follow everyone that follows you, but just think how that would encourage even more spam than there already is on Twitter. People would follow anyone and everyone. Hundreds of thousands of followers would not be uncommon and you would also be following hundreds of thousands. Someone like aplusk has over 2 million followers, but only follows, probably, a couple of dozen, which is manageable.

I use programs that get me followers, like Get Me Followers (click above..heeheh..blatant self-promotion), but it takes work to keep my following list manageable as my Followers list grows. What would be good is being able to have separate lists (maybe in a user control panel) that shows who is both following you AND being followed by you as opposed to those that you follow and want nothing to do with following you.

By: exinco

exinco — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:23:50 +0000

i’m interested in this script but i’m totally blur, how to implement it. i have no time to understand the program. btw you have a good sharing and thanks for that

By: Steve Driscoll

Steve Driscoll — Sun, 24 May 2009 21:31:01 +0000

Ah…I figure out the problem. The person has never made an update! LOL.

By: Steve Driscoll

Steve Driscoll — Sun, 24 May 2009 20:30:18 +0000

Thanks for the tips. I have a question (bug) that I’m trying to resolve…

I use the following code to get my list of friends which constitutes over 3k at the moment.

************
c_time = time.time()

friends = []
i = 1
while True:
f = api.GetFriends(page=i)
if f.__len__() == 0: break
i += 1
friends += f

************
I’m then trying to determine each friends last update with this code…

************
for friend in friends:
last_u = (c_time – friend.status.created_at_in_seconds) / (60*60*24)
if (last_u >= 10):
print “%s last posted %.2f day(s) ago” % (friend.screen_name, last_u)

************
This works for small lists of friends but not larger lists as I receive this error…

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “./twitter_api_poc.py”, line 77, in
last_u = (c_time – friend.status.created_at_in_seconds) / (60*60*24)
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘created_at_in_seconds’

Any thoughts?

By: Manish

Manish — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:14:25 +0000

Thanks man

This helped me a lot …

Manish

By: Cyde Weys

Cyde Weys — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:15:26 +0000

Thanks Peter. You’re absolutely right about the limit. I found out about it while playing around with Python-Twitter probably a day after I posted this. Fortunately, so long as you are already kept up on who you’re following, this script should work as written. As I understand it (and please correct me if I’m wrong), when you call GetFollowers without a page parameter, it should return the 100 most recent followers. I’ve been running this auto-follow script as written on one of my accounts and it works. So long as you aren’t getting more than 100 followers an hour (you should only be so lucky!), it’ll at least keep up with all of the new people to auto-follow.

By: Peter MacRobert

Peter MacRobert — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:59:48 +0000

This is handy, but won’t work if you have more than 100 followers or friends. Both the twitter API methods to return friends and followers only return 100 users at a time. The twitter.py library takes a page variable to accomodate this, i.e.:

following = []
i = 1
while True:
f = api.GetFriends(page=i)
if f.__len__() == 0: break
i += 1
following += f

Bearing in mind this will hammer the twitter API, and will use up your hourly API call allocation before the script finishes if you have a large number of friends or followers. So you’ll need to batch this process up and execute it over a period of time.

Hope it helps,

Peter