Clearing Out The Cruft: Twitter Favorites

While I agree that tweets are largely ephemeral in nature, I appreciate my Twitter archive as a historical record and have no desire to join the ranks of the tweet-deleters. Yeah, I’ll delete the sporadic nonsensical, knee jerk, repetitive, or unfunny contribution. But I generally enjoy keeping my old stuff around. Exponentially so, as a blogger and since Twitter introduced native photos and video. However, Favorites, I just don’t get. I often star other’s tweets as an acknowledgement that I’ve read their 140 character note or as an ‘atta boy’ of sorts, if something is especially compelling — in which case, maybe I should have solely retweeted it to benefit my followers. Having these Favorite emoticon acknowledgements preserved for posterity seems like an exercise in noise, clutter, and perhaps misrepresentation. So I set out to delete the 8148 “likes” that I’ve anointed over the years.

No surprise: Twitter provides no mechanism to get this done. Fortunately, I stumbled upon Unfavinator which is the first and most important step in clearing the cruft. Upon linking your Twitter account, Unfavinator lists all of your favorites – 200 per page and without bulk deletion due to Twitter API restrictions. With thousands of favorites and a desire to avoid carpal tunnel syndrome, I turned to the iMacros browser plugin. Fortunately, unfavorited tweets are replaced by the favorited tweet below it. So a manual mass deletion means just clicking X in the same exact location, followed by hitting the refresh once you hit 200. And, thus, I recorded my macro and played it in a loop a number of times. Yeah, it was tedious (and periodically flaked out and I may not be done). But nowhere near as mind-numbing and time-consuming as clicking that mouse eight thousand plus times would be.

Sadly, my success may be short-lived, as moments after my favorites were cleared I tagged this tweet without giving it a second though.

2 thoughts on “Clearing Out The Cruft: Twitter Favorites”

  1. “Sadly, my success may be short-lived, as moments after my favorites were cleared I tagged this tweet without giving it a second though.”

    You need to create a macro to punch you in the head every time you do that. You’ll get conditioned quickly.

  2. Now I get why you would randomly favorite some of my tweets. I always used favorites for something I wanted to read later when I was at my computer or on my iPad.

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