muuter help and FAQ
Why muuter?
We've all been there: two of your friends start an argument, or someone is at an event and they NEED to tweet everything back, or going phone-picture-crazy. Whatever the reason, they seem to be all over your timeline, jumping at your screen.
Not to mention that if you do it manually and unfollow the -temporarily- loud twitterers, you risk forgetting to follow them back again.
So here is muuter to help you. With muuter you can tell us to mute your friend for some hours, and we'll take care of the rest.
Please explain "mute"
When you mute someone here on muuter, what really happens is this: 1) We save your request on our database 2) We send a command to Twitter so you stop following that person 3) When your set time passes, we send another command to Twitter so you start following that person again.
There's no other way to do this as of July 5th, 2009. Believe us, we thought about this long and hard.
How precise are the times you show?
We're testing frequencies and loads. As of July 5th, 2009, our updater process runs every 10 minutes, so if you set a mute request to end in 3 hours, worst-case scenario it'll end in 3 hours and 10 minutes.
We'll increase frequency to 5 minutes in the near future, once we check load averages and optimize some parts of the system.
What if I want to revert a "mute"?
You can come back anytime if you want to unmute your friends to start following them back immediately.
Can I mute someone forever through muuter?
We do temporary changes. If you want to -figuratively, of course- mute someone forever, why don't you just unfollow them?.
Can you at least allow me to mute someone for X (big #) hours/days?
Well, we created muuter to help you by remembering to follow again the muted friends after they stopped pestering your timeline. In most cases, that's a couple hours.
If you feel that someone needs to shut up for i.e. 20 days, maybe you're following the wrong person? We work under the premise that you'll miss your noisy friends after a while.
Can anyone else use muuter to mute people I'm following?
Not if you take the same precautions as with other websites. muuter saves your session and keeps it open as long as you want. If you're using a computer you don't fully control, we suggest that you use the sign out link after you finished working with the website.
How do I register here in muuter?
The process couldn't be easier (and safer!). Once you go to the Sign in page, we'll show you a special link you will click to authorize us on the Twitter website. Once Twitter knows you're OK with us, everything's set up and working until you tell Twitter to stop talking to us (read the next Q and A).
Is my data safe in muuter?
We don't ask and/or store your Twitter user and password, so your private data is safe with us, mainly because it's not WITH us.
You can sign in to muuter by connecting to Twitter and authorizing us to do our thing, and if you ever feel that you don't want us around anymore, simply go to your Twitter Connections settings page and take us outta there (they call it "Revoke Access").
What is this "API" thing?
API stands for Application Programming Interface. It's a "socket" programmed in a system so other systems can "plug into" and interoperate.
Twitter's API allows programs such as Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck and websites like muuter to interact with Twitter without their users going to the Twitter website
To prevent abuse, Twitter limits how many times a user can hit the API per hour, per day, etc. Around July 2009, it's 150 times an hour, just upgraded from 100.
Every time you use Seesmic Desktop to send a tweet, or mute someone here on muuter, you consume a hit to your API balance.
Learn how to mute people by direct message on the 
Note that the only way for us to make this work is by making you temporarily unfollow your noisy friend. If you need to mute someone without unfollowing, try