followt

An app that tracks the followers of Twitter users and answers questions such as "who unfollowed me, and when?"

This was written as an exercise in MongoDB to explore how the database works and how to get the most out of it. It is supposed to have educational value, but is not really a polished, practical solution (yet).

How to run it

The app consists of a background process that scans Twitter followers (Scanner.java) and a web UI that displays some basic follow/unfollow statistics about the accounts it monitors (WebUI.java).

• You need to have a Twitter API key and an access token, which you can request at dev.twitter.com. Put these into the file src/main/resources/twitter.properties.

• You need to have MongoDB installed and running on your local machine.

• Launch net.followt.Scanner as a background process.

• Launch net.followt.WebUI. It will run an embedded jetty server and listen on port 4567 on the local machine.

• To start monitoring a user, insert a document into the fscans collection in the followt database. This document needs to contain the user's numeric user id, e.g. db.fscans.insert({"user_id" : 22603349}). The Scanner process will perform one scan per minute (restricted to a batch of up to 5,000 users). It will cycle through all users in the fscans collection periodically.