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Unfollow inactive twitter users with just two clicks

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I’ve recently come to the conclusion that my Twitter account needs a spring clean. I’m following far too many people who have the social skill-set of a tin of dog food and far too many people who haven’t tweeted for ages. I’ve decided to tackle the inactive users first, largely because they’re easier to deal with than the spammers and the dim-wits/racists/Coldplay fans.

There’s tons of tools out there to help you figure out who’s inactive in your following list. Only a handful will allow you to bulk unfollow them, most of those don’t function particularly well.

Untweeps is the best tool I’ve found to weed out the lazy-bones from your following list. You simply sign in with Twitter and away you go. I chose 30 days of inactivity as my lazy criteria and let Untweeps get to work. You’re then presented with a list of inactive users who you can unfollow. Twitter said that the ‘Check All’ button was a violation of the TOS so unless you’ve only got a couple of followers you’ll want to try the CheckFox plugin for Firefox. With one click CheckFox allows you to select all the inactive users, you then hit the ‘Unfollow’ button and voila…all the inactive accounts you were following are gone.

I’d ove to hear what people think about Untweeps.

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  1. I tried untweeps with a 120 day cutoff. I decided I still wanted to use checkfox to check everything off, so I installed it in Firefox. I restarted Firefox and tried Untweeps again, but forgot to put in the 120 days. I pressed the backspace button, put in the 120 days, and tried to untweep. I was then told I’ve had my three free tries for the month, was asked to upgrade to the pro version, and I never actually got to use it to unfollow anyone.

  2. It only found 12 people for me to unfollow… I don’t think it works though because as a Coldplay fan I’ve somehow managed to sneak past your systematic unfollowing. 🙂

  3. Thanks to @rlamfink for resetting me; I was able to quickly unfollow 29 who haven’t tweeted in 2010. Just don’t press backspace when you try out untweeps!

  4. I spent 30 minutes trying to make this work and I get an overflow message at the bottom of the page. I do have a kind of big twitter account and wonder if that is the problem.I have tried other tools and so far nothing works.

  5. Try giving @rlamfink a nudge on twitter, untweeps is his baby. Hope he can help!