How to Follow iPhone Developers on Twitter with Ruby

How to Follow iPhone Developers on Twitter with Ruby

This requires using a Ruby on Rails script. I do not take credit for the script as it was created by David Clements. Currently there are approximately 1000 users listed on the spreadsheet. Understand this will cause to to start following 1000+ people very quickly with this script.

A word of caution – Twitter has a follow / unfollow ratio that can suspend your acct if you follow too many people very quickly. So I would recommend using some caution with this script.

Requirements:

1. Ruby on Rails
2. Google Acct
3. Twitter Acct
4. Understanding of Terminal
5. The Ruby Script – Ruby Script – please note I made a few simple modifications to the script.

How to:

1. Open Terminal.

2. Update Ruby Gems on your local machine.
in terminal type: sudo gem update --system

3. Install the twitter gem (this is required to interact with twitter.com). I recommend installing an older version as the newest doesn’t work well with the ruby script.
in terminal type: sudo gem install twitter -v 0.4.1

4. Add the google spreadsheet gem source.
in terminal type: sudo gem sources -a http://gems.github.com

5. Install the google spreadsheet gem.
in terminal type: sudo gem install gimite-google-spreadsheet-ruby

6. UnZip & Open the Ruby Script in a text editor. You will need to enter your username and pass for both google and twitter. The user info is safe so no worries about entering it. Also note the instructions I added on line 27, 28, 29 of the script. If you prefer you can change it from 50 to a lower number, but I don’t recommend anything higher.

7. Save the file

8. In terminal navigate to the script (mines on my desktop)…
in terminal type: ruby follow_iphone_devs.rb

It will take about 30 seconds or so before anything happens, as the script has to access the spreadsheet and login to twitter. Then one by one it will start following the users shown on the spreadsheet.