I follow a lot of companies and people on Twitter—mostly companies, though.  I think maybe about 98% of who I follow on Twitter are who and what I consider to be my favorite celebrities, companies, and television shows.  However, I do follow back other accounts as well, particularly those who share my interests in writing, movies, or anything else arts-related.  (And of course I shun the spam accounts or the accounts that just don’t seem to tweet anything I find personally relevant.  Not because I’m trying to be picky, but because I don’t want to clog my feed with a bunch of tweets that push out the ones I actually want to read.)

That being said, I’ve been on the hunt for a while for a decent program that helps me keep my following list clean.  Most of the services I’ve found, however, have limitations.  For example, justunfollow.com is a “free” service,  but in order to lift limitations on features such as an unlimited “whitelist,” you have to pay some money, and from what I recall it’s not a one-time fee but a monthly charge.

Yeah, totally not doing that.

However, I recently discovered an excellent solution to my problem, and that’s the “Unfollow for Twitter“ app, created bySpicy Apps.  I found this app randomly earlier this week—every now and then I’ll just go to the Apple App Store and type in keywords for things I’m looking for, just to see if anything of value turns up.

If you want to know a little more about the app, then read on.  If you just want to skip to getting the app, click either of the two links I just provided in blue, or click the image (as I’ve hotlinked it), and it will take you straight to the download page.  Again, as far as I know, this is an app only available to the iPhone and iPad.

PROS:

• The app has a decent free option.  In free mode (either on iPhone or iPad), you are able to see when was the last time people tweeted as far back as six months.  This is great if you’re looking to “unfollow” inactive accounts or accounts who don’t tweet as frequently.
• It lists how many people have not followed you back out of all the people/companies/TV shows/etc. that you are following.  It gives you both a number and a list of the specific people.
• In paid mode, you get rid of the ads, which aren’t that obtrusive to begin with anyway (at least, I didn’t think so), but in fully unlocked paid mode, you can also get whitelist management and see who specifically unfollowed you.  For a flat one-time rate of $1.99, I think this is an awesome deal.
• You can “unfollow” multiple people at once, check on their tweets before making any action, and also in the paid version, you can see which of your followers unfollowed you.  So if you want to unfollow the people who no longer follow you (for whatever reason), then it’s easy to do so.

CONS:

• In order to unlock the “full features,” you need to pay $1.99 for them.  HOWEVER, it is a one-time fee, so honestly in the long run I think it’s worth it.
• There aren’t any real in-app instructions, so if you are confused how exactly to get certain features to work (like the whitelist), it might take some fiddling with the app before you can figure it out.  The whitelist was the only thing I had difficulty figuring out, and turns out all you have to do is pick the name you want to whitelist and then “swipe” to the right and a button that says “whitelist” will show up.  Click that, and you’ve whitelisted your follow/follower.
• The other main downside is that if you want the fully unlocked version of this app on both the iPhone and iPad, you need to pay for it twice.  It’s frustrating, but some companies do this (obviously) to make a profit.

Personally I would only pay for this app once, and only on the iPhone, mostly because of how the menu options appear in the iPhone version.  I think it’s just better organized.  Anyway, my main reason for sharing this little discovery of mine is because a lot of my followers seem to be using these monthly paid sites to help them with their Twitter spring cleaning, so to speak, and I’m just putting out there a much cheaper, more reasonable option.

Of course, a disclaimer before I leave you all.  Apps tend to fluctuate in price all the time, so the sooner you grab the $1.99 deal for the well-worth it fully unlocked features of this app, the better.  There’s no telling if the developer will ever change their mind and jack the price, which is what happened with some other apps I’ve reviewed in the past (a few of them even going from free to paid, which is unfortunate).  On the flip side, for the most part developers don’t seem interested in hurting their veterans/ambassadors/early adopters/whatever you want to call them.  So most likely if you get the app now at whatever price, they’re not going to turn around and try to make you pay more or again for something you purchased a while back.

Until next time!