LostAFollower Alpha Release
Managing relationships in social networks is difficult, just like managing real-world relationships is difficult. If someone unfriends you on Facebook, or stops following you on Twitter, is it because of something you posted? If a friend in real life stops talking to you, is it because of something you said? It can be difficult to tell, and the best course of action is probably to ask your friends what is going on, whether on social networking sites or in the real world.
But there is a difference here: the breaking-point status online is binary. Either someone is friends with you or they aren’t, they were following you but now they’ve stopped. And while sites like Twitter and Facebook are happy to tell you when you have a new friend request or a new follower, they sweep under the rug when someone reverses that action – all you notice is you have one less follower, or one less friend. Honestly, it bugs me – and I’m not the only one. Others have written services to monitor a user’s followers on Twitter, but they all fail in some function or another. Qwitter is an example of this – their service is so overloaded that your user only gets hit every couple *months.* Pretty terrible.
Which is why I wrote Lost A Follower. Lost A Follower addresses the problems I’ve described thus far – it is a service that monitors your Twitter profile. When you lose a follower, Lost A Follower gathers your last post to Twitter and the username of the individual and sends them both to you. Now you get a notification sent directly to your email that tells you who stopped following and, importantly, *why.* It is in its initial release right now, so I expect plenty of bugs on the server side – but I’m excited to get it off the ground. I have a lot planned for future versions and extensions of the Lost A Follower platform, but all that will come in due time :)
So if you are a stat-monger like me, or you just wish Twitter would help out a bit with managing your social network, give Lost A Follower a shot. It is free, developed by yours truly, and is currently in need of test subjects :)
