JustUnfollow blog

We are in the Alexa Top 5000!

Happy day today! JustUnfollow now has an Alexa rank of 4991 which means we're one among the Top 5000 websites of the world according to Alexa! 

Just a few stats as of today : 

1. We have 326,000 registered users
2. Since launch we've seen over 115 million unfollows
3. On a regular day more than 0.5 million users get unfollowed using JustUnfollow

With JustUnfollow you can do the following: 

1. Show Non Followers - Find and unfollow users who do not follow you back
2. Show Fans - Find and follow users who follow you
3. Show Inactive Following - Find and unfollow inactive twitter users i.e. users who have not tweeted from a long time
4. Whitelist - Add users you do not wish to unfollow to the Whitelist
5. FriendFollower - Follow another twitter account's followers (currently being tested hence access to Premium accounts only). This helps you gain new followers in your niche since you can copy accounts that are similar to yours
6. FriendCheck - Find if a particular twitter user follows you and if you follow them

[Update: Bug Fixed!] Bug which kicks in if you have more than 50,000 friends or followers

Just realized there's a bug in the system which kicks in if a user has more than 50,000 friends/followers. The behaviour of the app in such a case cannot be predicted and it might so happen that the non-follower/fans displayed may be incorrect.

I'm fixing it right now, I request users with more than 50,000 friends/followers to please check back tomorrow. The bug would be fixed and you can then safely start using JustUnfollow again.

Here's a technical description of the bug for those who understand a bit of tech : 

I cache friends and followers of a user using memcache provided by the Google App Engine. Memcache has a limit of 1 MB data size that can be cached. I was aware of the limit but never realized this limit would kick in if there are more than 50000 integer ids in my datastructure.

I'm planning to break cache into multiple little caches so that the memcache size limit is honored. Apart from this, the error being thrown by memcache had a severity level of "info" which meant I never caught the error in my logs in production! It was only after a user complained about inconsistent results that I debugged with a large set of friend ids and realized the size limit being hit.

 Update: I have fixed this bug which means it doesn't matter how many followers/non-followers you have. If your account has the API limits to retrieve all your followers/non-followers, JustUnfollow has the power to process your non-followers :)

I would like to thank @LarryWentz for pointing out the above mentioned bug. It's amazing to know that a user with so many followers still cares about those who follow him!

JustUnfollow Premium at just $4.95 per year

JustUnfollow Premium was launched on the 5th of August. It's been well received and users are finding the price to be good enough to go for the Premium service.

With JustUnfollow Premium you can unfollow and follow as many users as you want per day (of course, the normal limits that twitter has set will still apply). Premium users can link as many accounts as they want. 

To upgrade your account to Premium, login to http://justunfollow.com and click the green 'Upgrade' link at top right corner.

You can make payments either using your paypal account or any credit card. Hope you like what JustUnfollow Premium has to offer.

Ju-premium

What's the point of unfollowing those who do not follow back?

I get asked often as to why I made JustUnfollow, why should anyone unfollow if they aren't followed back. There are a lot of "legitimate" reasons why you would want to unfollow someone who isn't following you back on twitter and I'll list some of them here, keep adding more as and when I remember new points and you can pitch in your thoughts as well!

1. Many a times, users with the intention of increasing their follower count tend to follow you. You being the "good guy" follow them back and start seeing their updates. Now, this person who happened to follow you, stops following you thus making others think that he/she is someone worth following since the number of followers they have is much more than the number of friends. Shouldn't you unfollow such people!

2. When I first joined twitter, I did not know what to do with it. And, twitter isn't an easy thing for new users, they do not know where to start. So like any newcomer, I ended up following a lot of unknown people on twitter. Slowly I made friends with a few of them but never interacted with many others. Most of the times, I realized I did not interact much with those who did not follow me. The reason's simple, you would strike a conversation with me only if you see my updates, for which you need to follow me! It was time to clean up, I had to unfollow those who did not follow back.

3. Twitter has a follow limit. You cannot follow more than 2000 users to start with. Now, when you reach that limit, and want to follow a new user, you would need to unfollow someone from those 2000 friends. Whom do you choose to unfollow? How do you make that decision? To make things easy, you can start unfollowing those who aren't following you since they really do not care about your updates!

Do you have any legitimate and valid reason to unfollow non-followers?

Apart from non-followers, I'm trying to figure out more reasons to unfollow users. A few new features might be added to JustUnfollow soon. Stay tuned!

Twitter users love to Unfollow!

It's been almost 70 days since I launched http://JustUnfollow.com

Users have unfollowed 991785 times until now. I guess in the next few hours JustUnfollow would be reaching the magic 1 million unfollows mark!

On an average, 595 users have been unfollowed every hour since the day of launch. That's some amazing statistics and I predict these numbers to climb higher as more and more users discover JustUnfollow.com!

The app gets around 2500 unique visits per day (over 6000 page views per day). The bounce rate is around 22% ( don't know if it's good or bad but seems alright to me). Major part of the traffic comes from the US and Japan. Firefox seems to be the browser of choice among JustUnfollow users and I see a lot of Opera Mini and Blackberry users as well.

Wish me luck, hope to double the number of unique visits soon.