I had an itch to build something over the weekend, so I wrote a little Twitter toy script. I call it TwitterSnooze. It allows you to hit the snooze button on your Twitter friends. That means, you stop following them for a period of time, and then automatically re-follow them X days later.

Why use TwitterSnooze…?

  • It’s a good tool to avoid a blast of tweets from a conference you are not attending… just snooze the conference goers for a few days.
  • It’s a nice way to get back at someone for saying something stupid… give them the silent treatment ;)
  • It’s a good way to ignore someone that just flooded your timeline for no good reason… but it was just a one-time offense and doesn’t merit permanent unfollowing.



Who shouldn’t use TwitterSnooze…?

  • As Dave Winer points out, TwitterSnooze is not ideal because when a person is unsnoozed, Twitter will send them an email alerting that person that you are now following them again. This is an unfortunate side-effect of the only way I know to implement a “Snooze” feature (by unfollowing and then re-following a user) given the current API. If you don’t like your snoozers getting alert emails, then TwitterSnooze is not for you.
  • Security Note: TwitterSnooze stores passwords on the DB. TwitterSnooze deletes all passwords once they are no longer needed, but if the idea of your password being stored on this server makes you squeamish, then TwitterSnooze is not for you.

TwitterSnooze is inspired by a Merlin Mann post.

Update: If you do use TwitterSnooze, I highly recommend sending this someecard along with it.