Social-networking sites thrive on the notion that the world is full of people who want to be your friend. They want to talk to you, befriend you, send you 140 character updates on their life.
Dig a little deeper, though, and there’s the side you rarely get to see. When your Facebook friends list appears to have depleted, when you suddenly stop receiving messages off someone, when the communication channels appear to have been blocked. When the world, basically, doesn’t like you after all. And nobody’s bothered to tell you.
Given that social-networking sites like to put across a happy-clappy image of friendship and joy, it’s not surprising that they’re less keen to tell you when someone doesn’t want to be as friendly with you any more.
And rogue app writers take advantage of the sites’ reluctance to reveal who can’t stand you, offering up all manner of “Find out who hates you” apps that do nothing more than steal your login details.
But if you’re inherently curious, there are tools and services that can get you just that information.
Be warned: should reading the following give you information that drives a wedge between you and your supposed friends, then don’t expect us to call Cilla Black to get you back together.
Who has unfriended you on Facebook?
Facebook’s a hard nut to crack when it doesn’t want to tell you something, but there is a way to find out who has ‘unfriended’ you on the service.
It’s a little bit fiddly. The best way we’ve found requires you to be running the Firefox web browser, and to download the Greasemonkey add-on.
Once you’ve installed that and restarted the browser, download the free Unfriend Finder script for Greasemonkey.
Unfriend Finder, as with most services of this ilk, can’t retrospectively find your unfollowers. Instead, it takes a snapshot of your friends list when first installed and will alert you to anyone who subsequently deletes you from their list. They’ll appear in the left-hand panel, underneath message, event and friend notifications.
Who’s ignored your friend request on Facebook?
This is another job for the Unfriend Finder. One of its additional functions is to keep a tally of those people who haven’t accepted a friend request from you. This feature does work retrospectively, as it simply pools all your unanswered requests, and presents them in a list. You can then, should you choose, withdraw the friend request.
That’ll teach them.
Who has unfollowed you on Twitter?
Given the instant nature of Twitter, it’s perhaps unsurprising that following and unfollowing is more volatile than arguably any other social-networking service. It’s not tricky to find out who’s unfollowed you, although you do need to surrender your login details to find out.
Head over to Who Unfollowed Me?, and click on the Sign In With Twitter button. This then logs you in as a Lite user, which allows you to check for new ‘unfollowers’ every 15 minutes.
It can’t dig into your previous history, and thus the service kicks in from the moment you logged in for the first time. From that point forward, though, whenever you lose a follower, you’ll know who you’ve offended.
Who isn’t following you back on Twitter?
If you want to see if one particular person you’re following isn’t reciprocating, the simple way is to just head to the main Twitter site. From there, locate the page of one of the people you follow (just click on your Following list if you don’t have direct addresses), and see if the option to Direct Message the person in question is active.
If it is, then they are following you. If it isn’t, they’re not. Simple as that.
If you’re looking for a more substantive list of non-reciprocators, head back to Who Unfollowed Me?. One of the options there is to list who isn’t following you back, and you’ll be presented with a rogue’s gallery of people who will accept your love, but not give it in return.
When did people stop following me on Twitter?
A few sites and services offer to track down which specific Tweets caused fluctuations in your numbers of followers, but we’re not always convinced by the results. TweetEffect, for instance, threw up variations that simply didn’t tally with our own manual follower counts.
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