How would one start making an unfollower website/app? One that would be used for a service like Instagram or Twitter. Just if I could get some pointers that would be great. Where to start, what to read, what to use, etc. Thanks!
Haha, funny coincidence I just launched my app called GetParakeet (can't post links) that does something similar. One of the things that it allows is to completely automate your tweeting experience so you can do something like, every 30 minutes tweet an article, or a retweet a tweet.
Another thing that it does is be able to send direct messages and tweets when people follow / unfollow you which I had to build it out myself and can help you with.
Anyways, enough of the shameless plug, I'm not sure how much you know about programming, but the best twitter library I found is the bear-twitter library for python. If you're a person that works with Rails, I would advise against the default Twitter gem as it only returns your API calls as cursor objects... so whenever you iterate through them, you'll run into Twitter's API rate limits. The bear-twitter module for python on the other hand, for whatever reason doesn't, so I assume there's some sort of caching logic in the middle of the calls.
Moving on, Twitter doesn't have any built in API calls for checking to see who has recently followed you / unfollowed you. The way I had to do it was I had to manually call Twitter's API to get ALL the current user's followers and then store than in a table. Every 5 minutes, I'd then do the call AGAIN, then do a diff between these two lists. Whatever changes is either them following or unfollowing.
Anyways, I hope this helps. It's a long process but if you had any questions about the specifics let me know and I can help. Don't forget to check out Parakeet, haha
