Dossy Shiobara wrote a nice little utility called the Twitter Karma Tool. It allows you to see in a single page who you’re following, who’s following you, and mutual relationships. One of it’s features that I’ve previously taken advantage of was the “bulk unfollow” button at the bottom of the “only following” view. It would allow you to unfollow anyone who isn’t also following you back. Very useful either if you’re an abusive Twitter user, trying to game their following/followed threashold, or are just a dick.

I haven’t used this feature, well, not for anything important.

bulk unfollowing is, apparently, the wrong kind of automation

About two months ago or so the “bulk unfollow” functionality was removed and this friendly little note was posted to explain.

On January 15, 2010, Twitter instructed us to remove the “bulk unfollow” capability of Twitter Karma as it has been determined to violate their Automation Rules and Best Practices. We have done so in order to comply with their request. We apologize to you, our users, for having to make this change, but hope you will understand it is outside of our control.

Each profile listing still has it’s own link to unfollow that user, but since Dossy removed the automation, I figured I’d recreate it with a super simple bookmarklet.

Twitter Karma Bulk Unfollow
Twitter Karma Bulk Unfollow

Just drag it up to your bookmark toolbar, and unfollow all the people on the page. I decided to not care if a user’s profile checkbox is checked or not, so be warned.

*NOTE* I am very much aware of the irony in having written a bookmarklet to bulk unfollow users through a tool called Twitter Karma.

*UPDATE* I somehow managed to toss the alert() in the wrong place and didn’t catch it somehow. The bookmarklet is now fixed, sorry if annoyed the hell out of you trying to use it.

Typically I ignore game/toy Facebook apps that burdon my friends with inane wall posts. Typically their business models hook into some sort of affiliate marketing scheme, and for the most part, these apps are just pollution.

Friend FAQ is exactly like this, though for some reason I still decided to click through and check it out. Finding out who “said” what about you, however, does require you to spend ‘points’. This is something that I do not plan on doing.

Some of what my friends “said” did however make me smile, and many of the answers were very nice, so I thought I’d share.

• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane lets the “yellow mellow”? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane will do anything to get what they want? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can do 20 pushups? Yes
• Would Nater Kane ever dress up in a mascot outfit and run around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane grinds their teeth while sleeping? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever used steroids? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever given money to a homeless person? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is a freak? No
• Do you think Nater Kane parties too much? No
• Do you think your first impression of Nater Kane was right? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is mean? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can eat more than 3 Big Macs at a time? No
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think Nater Kane has ever pulled an all-nighter? Yes
• Find out who answered for 50 coins!Do you think that Nater Kane is a slacker? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane looks good in a bathing suit? No
• Do you think Nater Kane is a spaz? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has showered today? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane ‘plays with themselves’? No
• Does Nater Kane have a nice butt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane watches the TV show “24″? Yes
• Have you ever had a crush on Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever fooled around at work? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has game? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is cuter than Brad Pitt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane puts ‘hoes’ before ‘bros’? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever played strip poker? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane is selfish? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane likes blue eyes? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane voted for Obama? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has a funny looking nose? No

First let me thank Josh Klein for mentioning this on his blog before I got around to it…

So…

I have recently been working on starting a website called Democratus that will be a sort of “customer service platform for government” and provide a place for ideas for change to come directly from the people and be delivered directly to our representatives and press. We hope to be able to get this website off the ground by early next year, but in order to do that we’re looking for some funding. Recently we applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation, who sponsor a contest for ideas like this, and we’re very hopeful that this will provide the funding we need to launch the site, but we need your help to get the grant.

All you need to do is visit the website of the Knight Foundation and our page there, and register and vote on our idea. It should only take a minute or two and it would really help. If you want to read our application it is there on the website, and if you want to leave a comment on the proposal after reading it (something about how innovative and important this would be in your life, for instance) that would be even better.

Feel free to forward this post to other people that you think are interested in encouraging political participation and efforts to make our democracy more direct.

1) Register with the Knight Foundation: http://is.gd/6cTK

2) Vist our site: http://is.gd/6cU3

3) Vote and comment on our proposal (clicking on 5 stars won’t hurt)

4) And then if you’d like, tell us what you think by sending us an email to Nate.Heasley@gmail.com or nater@naterkane.com

Another Twitter ( http://twitter.com ) API script announced today, Did Yuh’ Know? ( http://didyuh.com ). Did Yuh’ will allow Twitter users to prefix their messages with DYK: or YUH: to note that their message contains short fact, clipping, or idea. Messages with the prefixes will be displayed on the Did Yuh’ site. This service is similar to Sidebar Creative’s http://overheard.it/ and Matt & Mark Armendariz’s (they’re friends but not actually related) http://yayandnay.com

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I’ve been playing with Summize for a bit now. Their super-fast queries are just really gratifying. I’m also a fan of Get Satisfaction (and trying to get satisfaction in life in general as well), though my relationship with GS is much more recent. Yesterday I found an article that showed me something pretty cool that GS is doing. They call it Overheard.

What is Overheard?

Overheard is a new feature of Get Satisfaction that bridges the public Twitter stream into Get Satisfaction’s support network. Overheard lists recent Twitter posts (“tweets”) related to a company and allows any user, employee, or customer to convert a selected tweet into a rich, searchable Get Satisfaction topic.

When somebody replies to a tweet via Overheard, Get Satisfaction sends a reply to that person to let them know a conversation was started in response to their issue.

So now, whenever you post something on Twitter about a company, brand, service or product that’s been added to Get Satisfaction, you’re indirectly adding content to Get Satisfaction. It’s similar to when users of Facebook would accidentally add content to their profiles with Beacon, but not so creepy.