Twitter Script – Who’s following you (or not following you)?

Article
02/18/2009

Find out who your friends really are with this handy PowerShell script! Essentially it will go through your friends and followers and produce two “difference” lists; people who follow you that you’re not following and people you follow but don’t follow you back.

[Update 20/2/09: Made a minor change to the sript to avoid the server returning 417 Expectation Failed]

Originally I created this as a little console app as a safety net to catch those people who’d followed me but I hadn’t pushed the button to follow them. I thought it might be easier to share it as a PowerShell script. I used a couple of James’s functions but as I didn’t understand some of his bits I had to re-write them my own way (which almost certainly isn’t as good a way given James knows a lot more about PowerShell than I do but at least I now think I know what’s going on).

All you have to do is copy and paste the below script at a PowerShell prompt – change the Username and Password first! When it runs it populates two arrays $notfriended and $notfollowed (just type the names at the prompt to list their contents).

There’s an example at the end (commented out) of how to iterate over the $notfriended list to add the people who are following you but you’re not yet following.

There is a rate limit on the Twitter API. If you have *a lot* of friends / followers, you may hit it. The call to Get-TwitterLimitStatus gives you a short summary of your current limit status.

Usual rules apply, no warranties, limited testing, limited error handling, use at your own risk, yadda, yadda, yadda…

#############################################################
## Add or Remove a friend with the given ID
#############################################################
Function AddOrRemove-TwitterFriend ( [string] $ID,
                                                                    [string] $Command,
                                                                    [string] $Username,
                                                                    [string] $Password)
{
[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::Expect100Continue = $false

if ($ID -ne $null) {
    $request =
      [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create("https://twitter.com/friendships/$Command/$ID.xml")
    $request.Credentials = new-object System.Net.NetworkCredential($Username, $Password)
    $request.Method = "POST"
    $request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"
    $formdata = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes( 'follow=true' )
    $requestStream = $request.GetRequestStream()
    $requestStream.Write($formdata, 0, $formdata.Length)
    $requestStream.Close()
    $response = $request.GetResponse()

    $reader = new-object System.IO.StreamReader($response.GetResponseStream())
       $result = $reader.ReadToEnd()
    $reader.Close()
    return $result
}
}

#############################################################
## Get the current rate limit status for account or IP address
#############################################################
Function Get-TwitterLimitStatus ( [string] $Username, [string] $Password )
{
if ($WebClient -eq $null) {
    $Global:WebClient=new-object System.Net.WebClient
}
if ($Username) {
    $WebClient.Credentials =
      (New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential -argumentList $Username, $Password)
}

$URL = "https://twitter.com/account/rate_limit_status.xml"
return $WebClient.DownloadString($URL)
}

#############################################################
## Get all the friends / followers of the authenticated user or the specific ID
#############################################################
Function Get-TwitterFriendOrFollower ( [string] $Username,
                                                                    [string] $Password,
                                                                    [string] $Command,
                                                                    [string] $ID )
{
if ($WebClient -eq $null) {
    $Global:WebClient=new-object System.Net.WebClient
}
if ($Username) {
    $WebClient.Credentials =
      (New-Object System.Net.NetworkCredential -argumentList $Username, $Password)
}
if ($ID) {
    $URL="https://twitter.com/statuses/$Command/$ID.xml?page="
}
else {
    $URL="https://twitter.com/statuses/$Command.xml?page="
}
$page = 1
$friends = @()
do {
    $rawResponse = $WebClient.DownloadString($url+$Page)
    $response = (([xml]($rawResponse)).users.user)
    if ($response -ne $null) {
      foreach ($u in $response) {
        $friends += $u["screen_name"].psbase.InnerText
      }
    }
    $page ++
} while ($response.count -gt 0)
return $friends
}

#############################################################
# Add your username and password here
#############################################################
$Username = "MyUsername"
$Password = "MyPassword"

[System.Net.ServicePointManager]::Expect100Continue = $false

## Show the current rate limiet status for this account / IP
Get-TwitterLimitStatus $Username $Password

## Get a complete list of friends (ie people you follow)
$friends = Get-TwitterFriendOrFollower $Username $Password "friends"

## Get a complete list of followers (people who follow you)
$followers = Get-TwitterFriendOrFollower $Username $Password "followers"

## Generate a list of people that follow you but you don't follow them
$notfriended = @()
foreach ($item in $followers) { if (!($friends -contains $item)) { $notfriended += $item } }

## Generate a list of people you follow but who don't follow you
$notfollowed = @()
foreach ($item in $friends) { if (!($followers -contains $item)) { $notfollowed += $item } }

## This will add a follow for all the people in your notfriended list
##foreach ($item in $notfriended) { AddOrRemove-TwitterFriend $item "create" $Username $Password }

Technorati Tags: powershell,twitter,followers,windows

Twitter Script – Who’s following you (or not following you)?

Additional resources