How to auto-follow on Twitter

Image via Wikipedia

Ever since announcing that I’d basically follow anyone who’s followed me, I had to come up with a way to make this happen in a timely, efficient process. So here’s how I do it, if you want to use this bizarre workflow yourself.

1. Aggregate all the “now following you” emails from Twitter in Mozilla Thunderbird.
2. In Thunderbird, filter all these to a separate folder.
3. On disk, open the Twitter folder in BBEdit.
4. Extract all the lines containing “is now following”.
5. De-dupe, then dump these into a text file.
6. Strip out the Twitter usernames in parentheses.
7. Copy and paste that list into a plain text file I call follow.txt.
8. Run fu.php (a php script) to process those user names.
9. Done!

fu.php is more or less the magic sauce along with BBEdit. I do this once every day or so to sync up new followers, and it works like a charm. fu.php I run in the Mac OS Terminal. This process looks complex, but in reality, it takes all of 2 minutes to do at most.

Here’s the source code:

<?php
// curl twitter follow script

set_time_limit(3600);

function follow($username)
{
$url = “http://username:password@twitter.com/friendships/create/$username.json”;

if (!$curld = curl_init()) {
echo “Could not initialize cURL session.\n”;
exit;
}

echo $url;
if (!$curld = curl_init()) {
echo “Could not initialize cURL session.\n”;
exit;
}

curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_GET, true);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_HEADER, false);
curl_setopt($curld, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$output=curl_exec($curld);

//echo “Received data: \n\n$output\n\n”;

$pile=json_decode($output,true);
return $pile;

}

$handle = @fopen(“follow.txt”, “r”);
if ($handle) {
while (!feof($handle)) {
$users[] = fgets($handle, 4096);
}
fclose($handle);
}

foreach($users as $key=> $value){
$user=ereg_replace(“\n”,”",$value);
$result=follow($user);
print_r($result);
}

?>

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