People use the favorites feature in Twitter differently. The way I use it, is to mark tweets that I want to look up later. I usually access Twitter on the phone, and many times I find interesting tweets that link to websites or articles. I mark these tweets as favorites, and later look them up in a desktop twitter client.

Over time this has left me with a huge number of tweets marked as favorites, and I was looking for an easy way to remove the favorite status from them. The prospect of going through them one by one was not a tempting option, as we are talking about hundreds and thousands of messages. I love to code in Ruby, and John Nunemaker has coded a twitter gem that wraps the Twitter API. From there it was but a short step to write a code snippet that did what I wanted:

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require "twitter"
require "yaml"

class Unfavorite

  def configure
    twitter_credentials = YAML.load_file("twitter_credentials.yml")["twitter"]
    Twitter.configure do |config|
      config.consumer_key = twitter_credentials["consumer_key"]
      config.consumer_secret = twitter_credentials["consumer_secret"]
      config.oauth_token = twitter_credentials["oauth_token"]
      config.oauth_token_secret = twitter_credentials["oauth_token_secret"]
    end
  end

  def get_favorites
    favs = []
    page_num = 1
    begin
      page = Twitter.favorites(:page => page_num)
      favs += page
      page_num += 1
    end while page.size > 0
    favs
  end

  def unfavorite(favorites)
    favorites.each do |tweet|
      Twitter.favorite_destroy tweet.id
    end
  end

end

uf = Unfavorite.new
uf.configure
favs = uf.get_favorites
uf.unfavorite favs

The code above is mostly self explanatory. To use it, you need to register as a developer on the Twitter website to get the required keys and token used for authorization. I am storing the twitter authorization information in a YAML file separate from the code, but for a snippet like this, the keys and tokens could easily be hardcoded directly in the configure method.

The structure of the YAML file is as follows:

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twitter:
  consumer_key: [replace with key assigned from dev.twitter.com]
  consumer_secret: [replace with secret assigned from dev.twitter.com]
  oauth_token: [replace with token assigned from dev.twitter.com]
  oauth_token_secret: [replace with secret assigned from dev.twitter.com]

I have found this code to be a very convenient way to clean up my Twitter favorites, and hopefully someone else can also find it of use.