Have you ever been frustrated by the fact that someone you follow on Twitter is constantly posting thoughts, musings and observations about topics that you do not care for or updates from events that are of no relevance to you? Well there’s a new app that can help you avoid the incessant tweets from someone on holiday or someone who feels the need to throw in their tuppence worth about the Olympics with every passing event.
The Twitter Doghouse lets you temporarily unfollow users for a scheduled period of time, so you can either just ignore that person for a while, or give them a nudge to say that you’ve had enough of their updates. You can unfollow someone for as little as one minute (perhaps to just make a point to them) or for as long as you want. So for example you might unfollow someone for a week if you know they are going to be tweeting from SXSW and you’re not too interested.
Created by developers Elan Dubrofsky and Jure Stern, Twitter Doghouse was the result of a challenge posted on CloudSpokes, a crowdsourcing development platform. Dubrofsky coded the app using Ruby on Rails and if any other programmers wanted to take a peek under the bonnet he has posted the open-source to his Github page.
Using the Twitter Doghouse is very straightforward, you simply login with your Twitter credentials and then specify which user(s) you’d like to unfollow and for how long.
Would you put anyone in the Twitter Doghouse? What sort of tweets or topics would warrant someone being temporarily banished from your stream? Let us know what rattles your cage by leaving a comment below.