You may be all nice and sugar on Twitter, but at times people go mad and may block you. It happens. Once they block you, their updates do not appear in your friends’ timeline; but provided that they’re not protected by the user, here’s a trick you can do to get them back to your feed.
The idea
The idea is pretty simple. First, let’s name the players: we will call the person who blocked you the Hostile, and refer to you as, well, You. You will also need to create a new dummy account on Twitter, which we will refer to as Dummy. So, in essence, it works like this:
Dummy follows nobody
You follow Dummy
Dummy has its updates protected, and only You are authorized to read them
You install a script that fetches the updates (tweets) of the Hostile and posts them as Dummy
Hostile’s updates appear in your timeline as Dummy
What you’ll need
To do this trick, you will need to:
download and copy a special Perl script file to your computer
install the Perl Net::Twitter library in your computer
create a new dummy Twitter account
test that everything is working
make it run periodically (i.e. via cron)
have the computer always on and connected to the Internet (or install it to your server)
Required computer skills:intermediate / advanced.
If you feel geeky
Should you be familiar with crontabs and Perl here’s a chance to save a minute skimming the rest of this article and get the quick instructions in one paragraph. If not, move on to the next section.
Create a new account on Twitter, protect its updates, follow it with your primary account and authorize yourself. Then, you’ll have to download the perl script you’ll find later on in this page on your hard drive. You can place it anywhere you like. You invoke it as follows:
Decide how often you need to run the script and enter the command in your crontab. (When the script is run, it creates a hidden .twtproxy_<hostileusername>.txt file in your home dir to store the last tweet id.) In order for it to run, though, you’ll have to also install the Net::Twitter perl library to your computer. You can run different instances to proxy different users.
Instructions for the non-geeks
If you don’t think the last section got you covered, here’s a somewhat more detailed instructions list for you. Keep in mind though that I will not get really deep into the details because that would make the article really really long (and would require too much time to write as well). The following instructions assume you’re either running Mac OS X or some *NIX flavor (if you’re on Windows, you’ll have to figure out how to do it). So there we go!
1. Grab the script
Download the following perl script. It’s a simple text file, so you can either copy and paste the contents to a file named twtproxy.pl or click on “Raw” to download it (you may have to right click on the link and select to save the target file).
It doesn’t matter where you store the file or how you rename it. Just remember where you put it, we will need the path to it later.
2. Install the Net::Twitter library
This is the toughest part. You have to either grab the files from the Net::Twitter page or use cpan to install it automatically. The library depends on several other libraries that you also have to install. Unfortunately, I won’t go into any details here since I’m no perl expert. Suffice it to say that I did a sudo cpan -i Net::Twitter command on my terminal, then copied the files manually from the downloaded package to the Mac perl library. I have no idea if that was the correct way to do it. If you know a better way, please let us know in the comments and I’ll update this section accordingly.
3. Create a dummy Twitter account
Go to Twitter, log out (if you’re already logged in) and create a new account. Twitter allows you to have multiple accounts, but you can’t use the same e-mail address you’re already using in your other account. It doesn’t matter what username, real name etc you give to your proxy. You could name it to something similar to the Hostile username (so you know what it is, when you see it in your feed later) but then again keep in mind that this may raise suspicions to the Hostile if they ever see your account.
Once you have created your Dummy account, go to Settings and check the “Protect my updates” checkbox. Hit save. Now log in to your primary Twitter account and navigate to the Dummy account page (twitter.com/your_dummy_username) and request to follow this user. Log out again. Check the Dummy account’s e-mail, you should have an e-mail from Twitter telling you that someone (your primary account) would like to follow you. Click on the link to authorize the request.
So what you have done in this step, is to create a Dummy account whose posts can be seen only by you (as your primary account). If you don’t do this, and allow anyone to read the Dummy updates, there’s a chance the Hostile would find out that Dummy is copying their tweets and maybe block Dummy as well.
4. All set! Let’s test it out.
In order to test if the script is working, log in to Twitter (via the web or your favorite client) as your primary account. We’re going to run the script once, and instruct it to proxy the Hostile’s latest tweets. If it works, you’re going to see them being posted by the Dummy account, appearing in your feed.
Launch a terminal, go to the directory (folder) where the twtproxy.pl file resides, and issue this command:
Don’t copy paste this! You’ll have (of course) to replace dummy_username with the username of your Dummy account, etc. If you run the script and nothing happens, then it probably worked. If any error messages appear, then something’s broken. But in case it works, refresh your Twitter feed and you should see the blocked person’s latest updates appearing as your Dummy account. Voila.
Now, if you run the script again, you won’t get more tweets until the Hostile has posted something new. The script creates a hidden file in your home directory where it stores the id of the last tweet Hostile has posted. Upon consecutive executions, it is checking for the latest posts that are newer to that last tweet, so you only get the latest posts.
5. Create a cron job so the script runs in the background
This is not a trivial task. If you’re on Mac OS X, you can search for a GUI front end to cron jobs, or attempt to do it the hard way, which is: you have to create a new text file, including a line similar to this one:
The number in the first column (*/1) represents the frequency of the script’s execution in minutes. In this example, it will run every minute. You can change this to a higher number if you wish less frequent updates. The other asterisks are used to determine the frequency in days, weeks etc, but we won’t go into this detail here.
The ~ assumes that you have copied the script to your home folder. You can substitute it with the full path to where it resides on your hard disk. Also, note that you’ll have to insert a tab in between the fields of this line (not multiple spaces!). Sorry, but this is UNIX stuff, don’t blame me.
Once you’ve created this file, issue this command:
crontab mycrontab
(assuming that you did name your text file mycrontab). This command will read the file and create a permanent cron job, essentially telling the OS to run this command every minute (or as frequently as you told it).
Now, like I said, this is not trivial stuff. You should better look for a graphical way to create cronjobs if you feel unfamiliar with all this.
6. Let it flow
That’s it! If all the previous steps have succeeded, you’re done. Of course, since you’re running this script on your computer, it goes without saying that it will be effective only as long as your computer is turned on and connected to the Internet. In case you’re renting a space in a hosting server or have access to any other server, you can try to install it there (since that server is always on). The script is rather harmless and very light on resources so it won’t cause any troubles.
Remember
Perhaps it’s a good time at this point to think back and wonder “why did the Hostile block me in the first place?”. Did you say something to hurt them, or failed to behave properly? A little bit of introspection and an attempt to make ourselves better, never hurts.
Of course, there are other times when people just block you because they don’t like you telling them what they really are. However, I don’t see any reason to get into all this just to recover the tweets of any person (hey, if they blocked you, block them back and move on). But there could be cases (like mine) where I got blocked my a news-posting account, and even though I don’t like the guy who owns that thing, I find their news useful to read.
I hope you’ll never need to try this out, but if you do, I hope it works for you. The script is barely minimal at the moment, but it works. If enough interest is drawn to this technique, I will implement more features and maybe even re-write this post to be more helpful.
Time is precious, so I’ll skip the intro and get straight into the point: the Internet is the new television and people love to feed on other peoples’ disasters. Mix these two ingredients together and you have the vicarious social media users feeding on the world’s disasters in real time while being able to participate in the retransmission of the sad news. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner, television is no match to the new media.
There you have it, that’s the whole article summarized in one small paragraph. You can close this window now and go re-tweet this post. Or, maybe you do have a little bit of time to spend on actually reading an article besides its headline. If that is the case, read on.
We grew up watching TV
The Internet is a big thing now, but most of us grew up without it. Television, on the other hand has been the dominating media throughout our lives and we all had the joy of watching the news live on our TV set. Of course the term “news” is really a vague thing here since today the news on TV is nothing more than opinionated people who are getting paid to criticize politicians (and everybody else) while arguing with each other from within their small “windows” in the TV screen.
Now, since few people really care about politics and the good news either bore people or make them envy each other, TV people managed to keep the people alert (and thus increasing their profit) by portraying all sorts of misery, sickness, disaster and perversion that exists in every corner of our little universe we call Earth. Apparently, people fancy watching how other people were killed, murdered, injured or generally got involved in a nasty situation while they themselves are enjoying the comfort of their sofa and are eating pop corn.
“A hurricane killed a dozen of people“, “A mother murdered her son“, “Earthquake in X place – bodycount still going on“, “Serial killer maniac kills 20” and the list goes on and on and on. Millions upon millions of people sit on their couches every night to watch how the rest of the billions out there are having a hard time staying alive.
Finally, we are not passive TV zombies anymore
Ah, the new era; the Internet, world wide web, social media. The neat thing about social media is that no longer are you a passive receiver of information getting thrown to you via TV, but an active transceiver (transmitter / receiver hybrid) able to form your own network of people around the globe to connect to and participate in the endless flow of information (pointers) brokerage (popularity being its currency) that is taking place on Twitter, Friendfeed etc. Everybody is re-posting everybody else’s links to a gazillion of supposedly interesting blog posts or other media without (hardly) ever reading them. Social media forms the public opinion by counting which articles are getting the most re-tweeting (re-transmission from one user to another).
But the power of social media comes to play when something big is happening at some place of our world, like, for example, the terrorist attacks at Mumbai or the recent Iranian elections incident. Or just when a plane crashes, or an earthquake or wildfire happens. It is only then that social media portrays its value as an awesome tool that allows common people like you and me to post information (text, photo or even video) from the ground zero of every such incident so the world knows first-hand what’s going on in real-time.
Pay attention to they real keywords here: disaster, common people, real time. People are using social media as a tool that connects them to one another so they can transmit information about a disaster in real time. This is nothing less than a live transmission of disastrous news withing the network of users that you are a part of, meaning that you are no longer a passive receiver of the tragic news, but a lively active node in the social graph that gets to re-transmit the bad news to other people.
Yes, lucky social media participant; now you can be the man in the TV breaking news section with the information that the actual number of casualties is 53 and not 51 (according to some other user of course, who got it from another user who read it someplace). You can spend your whole day re-transmitting the information you’re getting from your network to, well, the rest of your network, not only vicariously feedingon the tragedy itself but taking pride in being the newsman in the same time.
It’s awesome.
(Now don’t get me wrong, I do love social media, but not always favor the way people are using them)
Imagine, for a moment, that you can listen to whatever every human being on Earth is saying; that whenever someone opens their mouth to say anything, it reaches your ears. Surely it would be overwhelming since there are so many people talking in the same time, so you’d end up going in a frenzy by this information overload. It wouldn’t be useful at all and you’d wish you were deaf.
Now, imagine the same thing, but this time you’ve got a very cool built-in feature in your brain that’s called “selective hearing“, which is the ability of your brain to selectively tune-in and hear only those people that you wish to do so. This way you could focus on those people whose sayings appear to be important to you in some way, and you could always mute or un-mute people’s voices in your brain at will.
Obviously, the latter would be very useful since it would give you the ability to tune-in to the sayings of different people of varying age, gender, race and culture; some kind of long-distance telepathy that would enable you to connect with dozens, hundreds or even millions of people worldwide who you would never have the chance of meeting up close or getting to listen to what they have to say. And it would be your own choice whether to listen to them, or not.
This is what Twitter is all about
If you can imagine this, then you have successfully grasped the idea of how Twitter works. It’s nothing but a tool that lets you say out loud anything you want. Anything. It’s like some sort of digital “voice” (only in written text) that reaches the farthest corners of Earth (as long as there’s Internet access), and everyone else can selectively tune-in to your digital voice at will. You follow (“tune in to”) the people whose voice is somehow meaningful to you, and let the rest go on talking without their talk reaching your “ears”. It’s dead simple, efficient and powerful.
Now, selective hearing is based on your ability to decide whose digital voice you get to pay attention to, or not; if you don’t think it’s worth listening to whatever some person is saying, you can just un-follow the person and therefore “tune out” of its voice. It’s that simple. No-one said you have to try and pay attention to thousands of people at the same time, it gets incomprehensible and it all breaks down. That’s why you get to choose who to follow and who not to.
But once you do follow somebody, that means that you are acting as a receiver of their “digital voice channel”, and of course you’re not alone; hundreds of even thousands other people may also be receivers to that person’s voice. In the same time you’re acting as a transmitter yourself, since you’re transmitting your own voice to the Twitterverse (Twitter Universe), where other people may opt-in to listen to.
If you don’t like what’s on the radio, just change the channel
When you’re listening to the radio and you don’t like the music its playing, what do you do? Do you call the producer of the show to complain about the bad music and ask them to comply to your taste, or just change the channel? Since Twitter is the equivalent of a medium through which millions of people get to have their own digital “radio” show (only in text, not voice) to express their thoughts and emotions out to the world in general and to no-one in particular, would you ever “call” them to tell them that that they should stop saying what they’re saying because you just happen not to like it?
Of course not. You would just change the channel. Therefore, when you don’t really like what someone is saying out loud to the world, remember that your selective hearing lets you tune out and recover your peace and serenity. Just un-follow them, but never ever tell people what they should say and what they should not, unless freedom of speech is lost and you get to decide what’s worthy of being spelled out and what’s not.
The next moment, I rushed to the MacBook Pro specs on Apple’s website to check out the maximum altitude for the device. As you can see in the screenshot, the climbers are operating their Macs 8,000 feet higher than the maximum operating altitude as well as 3,000 feet higher than the maximum storage altitude (not to mention that I’m pretty sure the temperature up there is by no means higher than 50° F (10° C). Despite all this hostile environment, they’re successfully using their Macs not for some trivial task (i.e. Twitter) but for video editing (perhaps they’re deliberately doing that to use the Mac’s boiling aluminum unibody frame as some form or heat source in the cold tent?).
The funny thing about this, is that since Apple is featuring the story in their feed, it looks like they’re taking pride of the fact that some people are using their products against the manufacturer’s instructions in a hostile environment. I wonder if their attitude would be the same if an unknown mountain climber supplied their Mac to a local Apple Store for service (after freezing the guts out of it in the highs of Everest) requesting free service / replacement covered by the warranty.
You know that kind of uber-science that applies to making your ridiculously designed, badly developed and utterly irrelevant website climb up the gazillion of steps in Google’s stairway to search heaven? Those “white” or “black” hat wizardry that Internet marketing gurus, SEO wizards and other Gandalf-like creatures are willing to perform (for a slight charge) to boost your company into mythical success?
It’s tagged SEO, for Search Engine Optimization. And it’s dead.
Amidst of a post-web 2.0 era struck by a recession and succumbing to the ultimate power sprouting out of the social media heaven, who needs SEO? There’s no search engine in Twitter, so who cares if your website is not listed in the first search results page? All that matters is to have a few hundreds of thousands of followers. Every person, service, website or even electrical appliance is on Twitter now, so who gives a damn about search engines?
Does SEO help you gain more friends in Facebook? No! Does SEO help you gain more followers in Twitter? No! Search engines are R.I.P., done, dead, kaput and in a state of panic. So forget about all the SEO crap, jump on the social media rescue wagon before the rest of the web plummets into cyber oblivion and let your social presence make you really famous!
Where do we go now?
So it’s the end of the Web as we know it, but what now? How can the social media help you get rich and famous? This is where the new wizardry comes in place: introducing the art of Own Ego Optimization, or OEO for short, the next-gen rituals that are guaranteed to boost you into the highest heights of Twitterland and the rest of the social network universes out there.
Now, out of an untold gesture of generosity, I am about to unfold the well hidden mysteries of OEO, so you can take advantage of this new extraordinary phenomenon for your own benefit without having to spend a penny. Pay attention, and you shall achieve social greatness!
So without further ado, here’s the ultimate spellbook of OEO wizardry:
Orientation: If you’ve been living under a rock for the past few years and you’re not on Twitter already, do it now. This is the most important step of your road to success.
No-one really wants to see you or your friend’s ugly bald head popping in their Twitter client next to your tweets. Instead, use the photo of a hot girl with big cleavage. It works wonders.
Follow as many people as you can. Someone tweeted about politics? Follow them. Or maybe someone tweeted about sports? Follow them. If someone tweets about new techniques to clean decayed elephant teeth cavities, follow them. The rule of thumb is, if it tweets, follow it.
Argue with everyone. Be an a**hole. Let everybody argue with you, debate you, and hate you. Many people have become famous using this spell alone (ha, no I won’t link them here, sorry!). Just remember: there is no bad publicity!
Feel free to act like a web celeb, even if you still haven’t become one. This will make you look like one of those uber-cool online celebrities. Actually it’s pretty easy; all you have to do is tweet about your daily activities, i.e. “bored, going to bed” / “out with @someguy, drinking beers” / “lol, you shuldn’t twerereet when yo’re drun k” etc.
Get all of your friends on Twitter, then tweet about things you do in common, i.e. “out with @supercooldude and @awesomepal drinking beers and designing our next web 4.0 app“
Organize and host conferences, un-conferences and social media seminars. (Caution, this is a really powerful spell!)
It’s pretty obvious but still has to be mentioned for the goofballs: constantly tweet about social media, Twitter and OEO
Re-tweet every 1 out of 5 of your friend’s tweets. It makes them feel special and they get to love you more. As a rule of thumb, if a tweet is not absolutely and utterly pointless, re-tweet it.
Get yourself a Friendfeed account, so you have something to do when the failwhale beast appears on your screen and you spare the suicide.
These are the pretty basic rules. Stick with them, and soon you’ll be a Twitter celebrity! Yes, it’s that easy. Many people have gone this path and so can you! All you have to do is dare to try it.
(If you found this post useful, tweet / digg / stumbleUpon / blog it by any means and go follow me on Twitter!)
Watching the number of my followers on Twitter increase during the past few weeks, I spent some time wondering why it happened. Why did people start following me all of a sudden? By correlating my tweeting habits with the increase in followers, I’ve come to some interesting realizations that I’d like to share with you.
Following is a list of factors that indeed brought an increase to the number of people that follow me on Twitter. I didn’t deliberately try to gain more followers, it just happened! However, the rest of the article is written in a way as to guide you on how to act if you do want to get more followers. It is advice that is coming out of personal experience so it could, or could not work for you.
Here’s the list (items presented in no particular order):
Tweet about a broad range of subjects.
This is because the more diverse the topics you post, the more people get to read them. Why? Because people seem to use the search functionality in order to find tweets about a subject of their liking, thus landing at your own tweets. If they like what you’re talking about, there’s a good chance they’ll follow you, in hope that your tweets will be worth reading (to them).
Tweet a lot.
Simply put, the more you tweet, the more probable it is: to get re-tweeted; to get discovered in search; to be read by your own followers.
Most Twitter users seem to have the notion that it’s good practice to follow back everyone that follows them (something that I don’t agree with), so they end up following hundreds of people, which results in a very noisy environment. It is highly probable for your tweets to become lost in all that noise, so the more you tweet the more probable it is for them to read your tweets.
Engage into existing conversations.
If one of your followers is in a conversation with other people that you may not follow (so you don’t see their tweets), get in that conversation by replying to that person. It is highly probable that the person will reply back to you, which will result in your @username being displayed to all the other people who are participating in the conversation, making it highly probable for them to click on it to find out who you are. The deeper you get into the conversation with that person, the more likely it is for the others to follow you, so they can read your tweets, which are now part of the conversation.
(Also, keep in mind that people are selfish, so it’s more probable to get their attention if you get to chat with them, rather than waiting for them to read your tweets and initiate a chat with you. Go ahead and make the first step.)
Tweet about trending topics.
If you tweet about something nobody cares, chances are nobody will give a damn about it. But if you’re tweeting about hot trending topics, it’s very probable that several people all over the globe will be reading your tweets that include the specific keywords of #hashtags for that topic. Many Twitter clients display the current trending topics, and you can always check out Twitter Search or Twitscoop to check them out.
Reply to “celebrities”.
Chances are, you’re following some of the so-called “web celebrities“, or “influentials“. These people have tens of thousands of followers, so it’s a safe bet to assume that they’re getting tons of replies. However, they do reply to some of their followers (some more often than others), one of which could be you. This results into tremendous exposure, since thousands of users will be seeing your @username in their screen, plus they may assume that you’re someone the celebs know (thus you’re momentarily gaining some form of pseudo-fame).
Create an interesting profile.
People won’t follow you blindly; usually they’ll check out your bio and your homepage to find out more about you and decide whether you’re someone worth following or not. That’s why you definitely have to have a bio in your Twitter profile, and if you have a blog or personal site include that as well. If you don’t have one, then link to your Flickr page, or your public Facebook account, or some other source of public information about yourself. (Personally, I never follow people who have a blank bio – I just can’t see any reason to follow someone who doesn’t have to say anything about themselves, because that’s what it means not to have a bio.)
Try to have an interesting bio and avoid being just “one more guy”. Admit to yourself that Twitter is full of geeks, so “Web developer” won’t make you much more interesting than the rest of the millions of web developers out there. Try to think of something that diversifies you from the masses, something that may intrigue others to find out more about you.
Using a real photo of yourself is good practice since people can put a face to your name and know they’re dealing with a specific individual, thus increasing trust. However, spend some time into finding a photo that looks good, and that you look good in it. A bad photo may have negative impact on the people who are considering whether to follow you or not (simply put, they don’t want to see that bad photo of yours in their screen whenever you tweet). If you’re a girl, you get bonus points if you use a hot photo of yourself (it will get you hordes of followers, but it’s up to you to decide if you want that!!!)
Also, keep in mind that using your real name encourages people to trust you even more, since you seem to be not just another Internet user who cowardly hides behind an obsolete username, but a certain individual responsible for your words. On another level, people may even assume that you’re someone who have accomplished something in your life, thus you’re known to the masses by your real name and that’s why you’re using it.
Tweet about Twitter, Social Media, Internet Marketing and SEO.
Twitter is an emerging trend. There’s much hype about it in the blogosphere, and most people use it to market themselves. If you examine the bios of random Twitter users, you’ll find out that perhaps half of them are “SEO experts“, “Internet Marketers“, “Social Media gurus” or some other self-titled masters of social wizardry. All these people are constantly using the search functionality to hunt for customers, so merely including the acronym SEO will get you followed by them (try it out, it works!). Besides, discussing Twitter and social media is a safe bet since it’s guaranteed that people care about that topic — otherwise they wouldn’t participate in social media at all!
Follow people from your local community.
People that live in your area or country, are more probable to want to follow you than others who live in the other side of Earth and share a totally different culture. If you’re not in the U.S. and English is not your basic language, try to get in touch with people from your country. They feel much better when they chat with compatriots in their native language, you have common grounds to share and you can always discuss about local news that seem to matter a lot more than tech stories.
Be nice.
The Internet is full of know-it-all, opinionated smartarses. Actually, the whole world is full of them but the Internet assists them into bringing out the worst of them. For some strange reason, some of those people have become successful just by behaving that way, but please don’t try to become one yourself. Be nice, kind, polite and sympathetic. Not only will people love you, but you’ll make the world a bit of a better place as well. If you can give just a bit of joy to one person with a tweet of yours, you are making the world a better place.
Stop trying to get more followers and be yourself!
Granted, you may want to gain more followers and you may want it badly for some reason, but that won’t make people follow you. So drop that attitude and the hypocrisy, stop being a phony and just be yourself! Express yourself, your thoughts and your feelings, discuss things that you actually care about and let your true self and your true personality shine through your online presence. People will respect your being genuine, true and honest and will love you for that!
Reconsider your goals
Remember that even if you do get hordes of people following you, most of them won’t really care about you, they won’t be reading your tweets and they will never interact with you. Only a few people will actually reply and show that they pay attention to your tweets. Treasure your interaction with these people, and keep in mind that it doesn’t really matter how many followers you have on Twitter. You don’t have to follow back people that you don’t know and don’t care about if you plan on actually reading other people’s tweets.
A great person shall always stand out for their character and their works. Try to become successful first and the followers will follow (if it is fame that you seek), not the other way around.
So why am I writing an article about getting more followers when I don’t believe you should be trying to get more followers? Because it’s a trending topic that so many people seem to care about. It’s up to you to decide how important it is to have people follow you on Twitter.
Feedback!
Did it work for you? Have you got experiences that you’d like to share? Please do so by leaving a comment below.
Once you have created your Dummy account, go to Settings and check the “Protect my updates” checkbox. Hit save. Now log in to your primary Twitter account and navigate to the Dummy account page (twitter.com/your_dummy_username) and request to follow this user. Log out again. Check the Dummy account’s e-mail, you should have an e-mail from Twitter telling you that someone (your primary account) would like to follow you. Click on the link to authorize the request.
