Twitter users have been up in arms at the micro-blogging service’s latest bug that causes users to randomly unfollow people without the account holders’ knowledge or consent.
The problem has been acknowledged by Twitter, with a spokesman saying: “This is a bug, and our team is working to fix it.” Thousands of users have tweeted about experiencing this problem, and there must be many more that haven’t yet noticed that they have unfollowed people.
Unlike adding friends on Facebook, Twitter is much more conducive to following large numbers of people (thousands, as opposed to hundreds of tens of friends), so it can be very hard to work out who you may have unfollowed in circumstances like this.
However, this is just the sort of situation that lead to us developing SocialSafe. By using SocialSafe to run incremental backups (that you can schedule to do automatically), you are able to view lists of people who you are following, people who follow you, people who have stopped following you, and crucially in this case people who you are no longer following.
Each individual backup has its own log of content, so if you only wanted to see who you had unfollowed in the past week, all you’d need to do is view any backups made in the last seven days for any ‘Lost Followings’.
Thankfully this bug doesn’t appear to have affected me, but I’ve just unfollowed a few users and run another backup to show you how this works with a screen shot:
From there you can just click on ‘View Items’ to see which poor souls have accidentally been given the chop, and for each user there is a thumbnail of their account picture that opens up into their Twitter bio with a link to their profile so you can simply go straight to their page and follow them again.
Unfortunately if you’ve already been affected by the Twitter unfollow bug and you don’t use SocialSafe yet, it won’t be able to tell you who you have stopped following after the first backup. However, once the first backup is complete any subsequent backups will show you any changes to your followers/following, and tell you who you have gained or lost, both in terms of followers and following.
To start your own offline digital backup journal visit the SocialSafe website. Don’t let a simple coding bug get the better of your online social life.
Thanks, I was just trying to find something which could tell me who I had unfollowed earlier today, will go and check it out. 🙂