What is a "TwitReport"? Well, you know the "new follower" emails that you get?
They aren't very useful, are they? I mean it's nice to know that you've got a new follower, but it doesn't tell you anything about them. So what do you do? You could click on the page and see if they are someone you want to follow but -- Oops, look, they have their updates protected. Or all they post is links to their website about how to profit from the new social media scene. Etc. Wouldn't it be nice to get a quick look at their 'stats'? How many followers / friends / posts they have? When did they join Twitter? On average, how often do they post? How many of those posts, on average, are @replies? Did they post anything for their Bio, Location, or Website? Can I see their last 20 updates so I can see if they seem interesting? 1) Who else do they follow who I follow? 2) Who else follows them who I follow? 3) Who else follows both me and this new person? If they look like a spammer, how about showing me the Block URL? For that matter, why not show me their Twitter avatar/icon/picture, I might not recognize their name, but I might recognize their picture. Well, that's what TwitReport tells you, all right in your email, so you can look them over at your leisure, even on the go (the emails are formatted to work well on an iPhone [including the picture] and should work on other mobile devices as well). (You can find out more including how to use it at http://tr.im/twitreport and/or follow @twitreport at http://twitter.com/twitreport ) That's the "What". The "How" is all done on the commandline, using standard Unix tools: curl, sed, grep, etc. In fact I've amassed a little collection of scripts designed to answer the question "How to do basic things on Twitter via the commandline". What to see everyone who follows you who you don't follow? What to see everyone who you follow who doesn't follow you? Want to "balance" your followers, that is, follow everyone who is following you and unfollow everyone who isn't? Want to be able to favorite the last update that someone posted just by using their name? [*] I coded up a bunch of these, including some with no real practical use ("Want to fav the last 20 posts that someone made?"), some that can be easily re-used (validate that a given input is a real twitter user, convert a Twitter ID to a Twitter Name), along with the script that powers twitreport, and put them all up here http://twitreport.tntluoma.com/ in the hopes that they might be of some use to someone FWIW TjL [*] why? two reasons: 1) Twitterrific pops up, I can cmd+tab to Terminal and fav it on the commandline. NO MOUSE NEEDED. Also, 2) I can KNOW that it went through. My satellite connection is kinda flaky sometimes, so my script will read back the tweet that I fav'd to make sure that it was the right one and to confirm that it went through
