Are you a non-sports fan but know there’s that one Olympic nut in your Twitter network who will be constantly posting pseudo analysis, lame jokes and failed bon mots for the next two weeks? Maybe you’ve got a friend who’s on vacation and posting way too many Foursquare check-ins, or know someone who insists on live-tweeting every episode of The Bachelor.
It could be time to put them in the Twitter Doghouse. That’s the name of a new app that lets users unfollow tweeps for scheduled periods of time to jokingly call out obnoxious behavior or seriously avoid Twitter-centric events of limited interest to the non-involved (SXSW, anyone?).
Twitter Doghouse was created by developers Elan Dubrofsky and Jure Stern in response to a challenge posted on the crowdsourcing development platform CloudSpokes.
Once you log in and authenticate with your Twitter credentials, you’ll be presented with a form to fill out indicating who you want to put on timeout and for how long. You can spurn someone for as short as one minute or as long as you want.
When you give someone the cold shoulder, you can keep it secret (they’ll still hypothetically be able to find out by scrolling through their entire list of followers and seeing you gone) or send an automated teasing tweet their way. Or, you can tweet to @TwitDoghouse to publicly request service.
Dubrofsky coded the app using Ruby on Rails and has the open-source code posted to his Github page so other programmers can check it out and suggest improvements or tweaks.
Do you think Twitter Doghouse would be a fun tool to play around with? In the comments, tell us who you want to ‘house.
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