Twitter does provide notifications for when new users start following you. It does now however provide any notifications when users stop following you. Now, there is an ample of web sites out there who do provide that service, in most cases though, they cost money, and ask you for a complete access to your Twitter account.

This is the Twitter prompt to authorize access for these kind of sites to your account. Do you feel comfortable agreeing to this after reading what that application actually will be able to do?

Now, it’s hard to blame these sites for asking for such extensive access though. Twitter app configuration settings allow only two modes of access request, Read Only, and Full Access like the one above. I’ve tweeted before about the need for more granular access permissions in Twitter here, so who knows, maybe one day.

Personally, I wasn’t willing to give some site out there a full access to my Twitter account. So, I did what most technologists do in these kinds of situations… I’ve built my own. It’s called TweeThingz and you use it for free at twee.thingz.io.

TweeThingz provides visualization of the follower trends, reports of daily follower events, and optional on-change email notifications. Best of all, TweeThingz only needs a read access to your Twitter account!

You can also get email notifications whenever there are daily changes to your follower, friend, or list stats. The notifications can be disabled in the Account preferences.

Finally, TweeThingz is very much a personal project. There is no ads or tracking. I’m running this service under personal account in Google Cloud, using Cloud Run and use Cloud SQL for state management, which until this grows to thousands (millions?) of users, makes TweeThingz operations pretty inexpensive. Enjoy it, and let me know what you think.