The TwitCleaner

I saw a tweet the other day about The Twit Cleaner.  Not knowing what it was about, I decided to check out the link.  According to the website, TwitCleaner will “Clean the garbage from your Tweetstream!”  I was curious what they meant by garbage and read on.  In addition to cleaning out the garbage, The Twit Cleaner said it will:

This sounded pretty cool to me so I thought I’d give it a try.  I knew I probably had many followers who haven’t posted a lot, but wasn’t sure the best way to gather the information.  I was also not sure who I was following who wasn’t following me back.  I do believe you benefit the most of out Twitter when the conversation goes both ways.  I certainly realize there are a lot of people with thousands of followers and they must be selective with who they follow back, but I wanted to check out what the people in my network were doing.  I logged onto the site and provided my information.  With a few hours, I received a link to my report.

The report included a summary that included information about the Tweeps it felt were potentially garbage.

The report provided me with some pretty interesting information about this potential “garbage,” much of it very useful and some of it surprising.  My followers were broken down in several categories:

Dodgy behavior. I’m not sure what they mean  by “dodgy,” but this section was broken down the following groups:

• Nothing But Links: Followers who posted nothing but links.  Not surprisingly, these were usually like CNET News, Education Week, ESPN, School Library Journal, among others.  Not a big deal to me.
• Tweeting The Same Links All The Time: These were followers who tweeted duplicate links more than 25% of the time.  I only had 2 in the group.
• Tweeting Identical Tweets All The Time: These posted the same tweet too many times.  Again, I only had 2.
• Other Dodgy Behavior, Now Absent: Any dodgy behavior, plus haven’t posted in ages.  I had 6.  I think I need the definition of dodgy to better understand this group.

No Activity in Over A Month. Pretty simple category.  Interestingly enough, I have 37 followers in this category.  I’ll probably take a closer look at some of these, but for the most part, if they aren’t contributing, they don’t need to be a part of my network.

Not Much Interaction. This category was broken down into three sections, all providing useful data.

• Not Active Yet: These are people with fewer than 10 tweets.  Perhaps this is a group to keep an eye on.  I had 8 in this group.
• Don’t Interact With Anyone: The people in this group NEVER interacts with any of their followers.  I guess they are just for putting information out there.  Again, I had 8 in this group.
• Hardly Follow Anyone: People that follow back less than 10% of the people who follow them.  For me, this group consisted of some celebrities, sports starts, the NBA, and TV shows like The Office and SNL.  It also included five big names in ed tech.  I can certainly understand this group – many of these have tens of thousands of followers.

From this report, I’m able to click on any of the people listed and I’m taken to their Twitter page.  This allows me easy access to unfollow if necessary.  I’m also able to unfollow any of these groups with a single click from the site.  I don’t anticipate doing that, with the possible selection of the No Activity in a Month group,  because there might be some reasons why I want to keep following some of them.

Overall, I think the report is valuable.  Finding out who is active is important.  I can imagine for the Twitter superstars with thousands of followers, this tool might even be more valuable.  I’d encourage you to take head over to The Twit Cleaner and run a report – if anything, the report will provide you with some pretty interesting information.  I bet you’ll be surprised to see some of the names in each of the sections.