For a little clarification, this policy item was added to our API Terms of Service with the release of our User Streams and Site Streams products. Both streams deliver negative events such as unfollows and unfavorites as distinct objects in the streams, so apps can adjust in real-time. This policy is intended to prevent the broadcast of these events to the end-user as notifications that the event happened.
In general, reporting who has unfollowed User A back to User A through derivative methods (such as comparing their current follower list to a cached version) is discouraged, but not prohibited. That same user could come to the same conclusions through a similar method. Following the spirit of this policy item, though, you may not broadcast these kinds of events to other users (i.e. you may not show User C that User B unfollowed User A). As always, if you have any questions about our policies, you can email a...@twitter.com. Brian Sutorius Twitter API Policy On Apr 11, 4:47 pm, Whonew <haag.j...@gmail.com> wrote: > I just wanted to make clear that I was in no way questioning the rule. > > I was just curious about the reasoning behind it, from Twitter's POV. > > I, of course, came to the same logical conclusion that you did, Nick. > That it was simply to maintain a positive atmosphere and avoid > contention. > > Thanks for your thoughtful replies. > > - John > > On Apr 9, 8:51 pm, nickmilon <nickmi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > > The intentions behind the rule is good, but what about the following > > list of applications (and many more) that do not respect the TOS ? > > >http://mashable.com/2010/08/09/track-twitter-unfollowers/ > > > happy coding :-) > > Nick > > > On Apr 9, 5:05 am, Nicholas Chase <nch...@earthlink.net> wrote: > > > > From a user perspective, I think it's good to know that you can > > > unfollow someone without them noticing, so you don't hurt their > > > feelings. The last thing that Twitter wants is to be linked to hard > > > feelings between people. > > > > But that's just my opinion. YMMV, but I wouldn't be surprised if that > > > were the reason. > > > > ---- Nick > > > > On 4/8/2011 9:57 PM, Whonew wrote: > > > > > Could someone from the Twitter staff go into some detail about why the > > > > Terms of Service stress not drawing attention to user's Unfollows? > > > > > I have no particular interest in doing so; but I have been struggling > > > > to figure out why as I'm certain that many users would like to know > > > > without jumping through hoops. > > > > > Thanks a lot! -- Twitter developer documentation and resources: http://dev.twitter.com/doc API updates via Twitter: http://twitter.com/twitterapi Issues/Enhancements Tracker: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/list Change your membership to this group: http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk
