How to auto-follow on Twitter

Image via Wikipedia

UPDATE:

As of September 1, 2010, Twitter has nuked functions like this from orbit. I now recommend you download and install the free TTYtter software from Floodgap Software that does substantially the same thing but is compliant with Twitter’s OAuth protocols.

The old post is kept below only for historical purposes.

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)
{
$url = “http://username:[email protected]/friendships/create/$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: nn$outputnn”;

$pile=json_decode($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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Related posts:

1. My Twitter Follow Policy
2. Why Twitter Matters : It's Your AP Newswire
3. Re-syncing Twitter