The Only Vanity URL You’ll Ever Want to Share

June 12th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

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facebookTonight Facebook is set to launch a new vanity URL feature enabling its users to have an easy-to-remember URL they can share with friends. We’re excited about this at SocialToo, because more than anything, it means a very high authority site will give us each the opportunity for some pretty strong SEO in the keywords we choose. We encourage everyone to go out and get a Facebook vanity URL for this purpose.

However, there is one URL we think you’ll find much more useful than that Facebook will be launching tonight.

Before you get your Facebook vanity URL we encourage everyone to come, sign up and reserve a SocialToo Vanity URL, and we’ll provide you a few extra features that Facebook won’t be providing with a simple yourusername.socialtoo.com URL that redirects to your Facebook Profile. Starting today, we’re launching SocialToo SocialStats, which starts with your SocialToo Vanity URLs that redirect to your Facebook Profile. Best of all, the features we’re launching today are 100% FREE.

Here’s how it works:

A couple days ago I shared on Twitter, FriendFeed, and Facebook my SocialToo Vanity URL, http://jessestay.socialtoo.com, asking my friends to add me as a friend if they haven’t already (Go ahead - add me!). Guess what? I can tell you a little bit about the success of that share:

  • Over 60 of you clicked on that link in that time
  • The most popular browsers were Mozilla and Opera
  • Most of the clicks came from FriendFeed
  • Most of the clicks were in the US, followed by Taiwan, Brazil, and France

Over the past few days we’ve been tracking clicks, browser usage, referal stats, and location data for each and every individual that has clicked on your SocialToo Vanity URL which redirects to your Facebook Profile. This morning we launched a way for you to look and track this data.

SocialStats

Right now, if you log into your SocialToo account, you’ll see a new tab called “SocialStats”. Click on it. You’ll notice we’ve added a series of organizable graphs now for you to track who is visiting your Facebook Profile. We have a graph that tracks clicks. We have a graph that tracks all of the most significant browsers. We have a graph that tracks whether users are coming from Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, or other sites when they click on your Vanity URL. We even have a graph that shows how many users are coming from each country. We’re working on much, much more.

The only URL you’ll ever want to share.

Previously there was no way of knowing the numbers and demographics of people clicking on your Facebook Profile. We’ve now provided a way to give you a good idea. Simply hand this URL to your friends, add it to your business cards (it’s on mine - is it on yours?), add the link to your website, and your Twitter and FriendFeed profiles. You now have a way of tracking how effective sharing those links are for you and your brand. This is the only URL you’ll ever need to share.

Are you a developer?

Contact me with your needs. We have an API and I’d like to make this information available to you! I envision a way we can allow you to share with your users how many people are clicking on these profile links they’re sharing with their friends. In addition, I’d like to enable your App to be included in our statistics - if you’d like for that to happen please contact us at contact@socialtoo.com and I’ll get you set up.  However I’d like to hear from you how you envision using this data and we’ll get you set up according to your needs at no charge whatsoever.

We’re on Facebook Too!

Just this morning, we officially launched the very beginnings of our SocialToo Facebook App. Go to http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo and you’ll be able to change your SocialToo username and Vanity URL right in the app! Or invite your Facebook friends to create their own Vanity URLs. This is a great way to get a little Karma for sharing a very useful tool.

SocialToo Facebook App

How do I sign up?

To get one, simply register at http://socialtoo.com/registration, select your username (and a password) - this username will be the first part of your SocialToo Vanity URL. Then click on the link in the Facebook section, get the code from Facebook, and enter it in the box provided. Hit submit, and you’re done! No Twitter username or credentials necessary!  Although we provide that, too.

Generate Code

If you already have a SocialToo account and haven’t set up Facebook yet, there should be a message when you log in, prompting you to click on a link and get a code from Facebook. Do that, enter the code, and you’re set!

Much, much more to come

This is only the beginning - I foresee being able to provide you with much more information in the future. Expect broken down referer and location/IP information. Expect the ability to tell what Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed users are sharing your links. Expect the ability to also have a short URL for your Twitter profile, your LinkedIn profile, your FriendFeed profile, and many other networks, all providing detailed analytics around who is visiting those URLs. Expect to see stats right in the Facebook App itself, and much more built in that area. Expect integration with Facebook Connect on SocialToo.com very soon.  We’re also working on integration with your Facebook Page.

Now, imagine a world where you can also track “conversions” with these URLs. Imagine if, in addition to tracking the clicks and other data surrounding them, being able to see how many new friends you’ve added in that day (or lost) in result of those clicks. SocialToo is all about Analytics. We’re doing all we can to help you learn about the people following you on the Social Networks you belong to. These are all things we’re working on and hopefully you’ll see very soon.  We’re your Companion to the Social Web.

So we wish you luck in getting the Facebook Vanity URL of your choice tonight. But for now, come on over to our Registration page, get the only URL you’ll ever need at SocialToo, and feel good that the “real” URL you are giving out will actually provide you some real value.

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Cut Down on Spam With Lists and Filters on SocialToo

June 1st, 2009 by Jesse Stay

SpamWe’ve talked here before about SocialToo’s commitment to providing you with a much cleaner experience on the Social Networks you belong to. We’ve provided an opt out of auto-dms through perhaps the largest source of these, TweetLater (and we thank them for providing that tool!). We’ve enabled you to blacklist people you don’t want us to ever follow on your behalf. We’ve enabled you to automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter. We’ve also enabled you to just unfollow those that unfollow you within a given number of days on Twitter.

Today I’d like to take that a little further. Starting now, you can log into SocialToo, click on the Preferences tab, and click on “Unfollowing Preferences” in the left navigation menu. You’ll notice your blacklist has moved there, along with 2 new lists. The first list, a whitelist, enables you to specify individuals you want to be sure we never unfollow for you. Consider this your “favorites” list - trust me, this will become even more useful very shortly, but for now it means even with auto-unfollow on or any of the filters or blacklisting on, we’ll never unfollow the people in that list.

Unfollowing Preferences

The second new list is an “auto-dmers” list. We want you to use this. This is your list, and only applies to you - we can’t make this decision for you. If you’re as annoyed with automatic direct messaging on Twitter as many on Twitter are getting, we’ve provided you a way to ensure these users are unfollowed, identified, and never followed again until they’re removed from the list. Why not just unfollow them, you may be asking?

Here’s the reason. When you add someone to your auto-dmers list, we give those users a score. The higher the score, the more users have been annoyed by their activity. We can’t tell 100% that these people are manually or automatically sending these, so we have to go by you, the user’s annoyance level. If they annoy you enough to unfollow them, we think that warrants an increase in their auto-dm score. We’ve done the same with your blacklist. The more people that blacklist an individual, the higher their “spam score”. This is an anonymous score that only we know, and is entirely controlled by our users. We have no control as to what goes into this list.

Now here’s the fun part. You’ll notice above those 3 lists a few new filters. You still have the ability to unfollow those who unfollow you, unfollow those who unfollow you in a given number days after they follow you, or do nothing at all with those unfollowers. However, we’ve added 2 new filters that I think are very powerful, especially the more people use them and populate their lists.

Now, if you check the boxes, “Never follow if friends have a spam score greater than [3]” or “Never follow if friends have an auto-dm score greater than [2]” we do some additional magic. If someone has been blacklisted by greater than 3 people on SocialToo (you can change this number), we’ll automatically unfollow them for you and never follow them again. If someone has been marked as an auto-dmer by more than 2 people (you can also change this number), we’ll automatically unfollow them for you and never follow them again as well. Change the numbers, and we’ll follow and unfollow accordingly.

We’ve just given complete control to you, the user, to determine who on Twitter is a spammer, and who is not. We’ve even automated the process for you and you can now choose to only follow those other users have not considered to be spamming, or auto-dming (assuming you consider that is spam) on Twitter. Have an exception to the rule? Just add them to your whitelist!

We have several more announcements this week we’ll be rolling out shortly so please stay tuned to this blog as we announce them. Most of all, we need your help spreading the word to get as many people populating these lists as possible so the system becomes as useful as can be. It’s 100% free so please fill out your lists, set your filters, and enjoy as your spam loads go down significantly. Most importantly, spread the word!

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Striving to Provide a Better SocialToo - New Rates Take Effect May 11

May 5th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

It has always been my goal to keep SocialToo’s free features free, and paid features paid. I want to make things as easy as possible for you to clean up your stream and learn about your followers with as few hurdles as possible. At the same time, in some way we need to keep the SocialToo service running so we can provide you with the best and most reliable service possible. It’s really hard to do this with a 100% free service.

Last week we announced soon we would be implementing a new, one-time rate plan for our nightly stat e-mails that would enable us to provide those that pay a much more accurate stats experience and higher rate of reliability for both our nightly stats e-mails and auto-follow and unfollow functionality. You may notice when you log into your account now a new overlay shows up telling you about this, giving you the opportunity to pay for the new prioritized service.

As of today you can now pay a 1-time $20 fee which, when it goes into effect Monday, May 11, will put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account, meaning a much more accurate and reliable service for you. Previous to this, we were only able to guarantee at least once per 24 hours, and as we grew, that time frame would get even larger. With support from our users, we will now be able to expand much further and provide a much more reliable service to you.

To pay for the service, simply log into your account and a popup overlay will show up with a Paypal button you can click on to pay for the service. It’s one-time, and you’ll never pay again for the e-mails. On Monday, May 11, 2009, we’ll turn off the e-mail service for all non-paying accounts (auto-follow and unfollow will still continue) and move all payed accounts over to a dedicated server (or more depending on the number of users we have to process) responsible for prioritizing just these accounts. Those that pay now will be transferred over automatically with no interruption in service. You’ll want to do this soon so you don’t miss out on any e-mails - we cannot re-send past e-mails if you do not pay for the service.

In addition, any new users, starting today can purchase the service immediately, and on Monday will also be included in the prioritized group of users. Those new users will start getting e-mails immediately and will experience no interruption in service when the change goes into effect on Monday.

As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided. We’ll also seek to improve the free and paid versions of these services as we move forward, including more options to stop auto-DM and spam on social networks you belong to.

I hope you can respect our decision to start charging for this specific service as we grow and strive to provide you with the best service possible. It’s a decision that I think in the end will benefit those that choose to partake of it and will enable us to make it even better in the future. I pledge to continue providing you the best service and best tools possible to help you analyze and track your follower base on the Social Networks you belong to. As always, you may contact me personally via our contact@socialtoo.com address with any questions. Consider us your Companion to the Social Web.

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Throttle The Number of People We Follow Per Day

May 4th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

I’m excited to announce a simple new feature that may make your life a little easier if you’re trying to catch up your followers, or simply have a lot of people we follow on your behalf per day on Twitter. You’ll now notice under your Preferences tab, under the check box to enable auto follow, there is now a drop-down with the number of maximum people we will follow on your behalf per day. Select a number that works for you (Twitter only allows a maximum of 1,000), and we’ll make sure we don’t go over your limit.

We enabled this due to request by some of you. It should be useful especially to those of you which want to manually follow a few per day without hitting Twitter’s 1,000 per day limit while we catch up your account for you. Or it could serve as a safety-net just to be sure you’re not following too many people at once.

Whatever your reason now you have some flexibility in the number of people we follow for you per day. I think some of you will really like this.

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Launching Our First Efforts at OAuth Integration

May 2nd, 2009 by Jesse Stay

OAuthDid you forget your password? In an attempt to test Twitter’s OAuth integration, we’ve made a very small move forward to integrate OAuth into SocialToo’s infrastructure. Starting today, those that forget their passwords can simply click a “login to Twitter” button, which will send the user to Twitter.com to log in and approve SocialToo. The user will then be redirected back to SocialToo where they can reset their password if their login was successful. We never see your Twitter password, and your data remains secure. Go to http://socialtoo.com/forgot to give it a try.

For those unaware, OAuth is a standard used by many sites like Google, Yahoo, and now Twitter to enable sites that need your information to not have to store your private usernames and passwords anywhere. In addition, it allows sites like Google, Yahoo, and Twitter to immediately turn off applications which might be misusing your data, making for a much more secure system.

We’re currently only testing this with our Forgot password form because Twitter has openly admitted there are still many flaws and the software is still in beta on their end. Once they’ve confirmed it’s stable enough for production code we will begin rolling this out throughout all of SocialToo, continuing our pledge to your security and privacy.

With this role out, we are now able to begin testing and preparing for a full OAuth launch on SocialToo. In addition, we will be able to give back to the community, as the Perl support for OAuth Twitter examples is fairly lacking at the moment. Since we’ve figured this out, expect some howtos for Perl developers, as well as, as I have time, perhaps some libraries other Perl developers can use to connect to Twitter via OAuth. Because of the technical nature I’ll be posting those over on my blog when they are ready.

This one small step is a large step for SocialToo, enabling us to prepare for something much bigger and larger down the road. We’re excited for the ability to put the control back in your hands again so we don’t have to store your passwords any more. As always, stay tuned here and we’ll update you on when that happens. Also, since this is beta please let us know via our @socialtoo account on Twitter if you see any problems.

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Status on Daily E-mails, New Rate Coming Soon

April 24th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

At SocialToo our focus is on helping you learn more about those you follow and who follow you back. We want to provide as reliable and accurate data as social networks will allow us to in order to allow you to do that. In my opinion, everything else we provide is simply a supporter of that goal and complement to it. You’ll see us build more and more towards that goal in the near future.

This is why it’s frustrating for me as much as it is for you when we’re not delivering 100% of your new followers and friends. Currently, we have been successful at providing your daily follower numbers via e-mail daily, but for some of you, the specific new follower and new unfollower numbers have been inaccurate. Unfortunately we hit a few growing pains and snags in our servers, and have had to find affordable ways to scale as we work on that. I’d like to share a little about what we’ve been doing to correct these issues.

First of all, we have completely revamped our tracking scripts on the backend to rely much less on the database. This means we can run the scripts much faster, and strain the database much less so more data can be stored and retrieved as quickly as possible. We have even tested this with some of our users with up to millions of followers and they have performed fabulously. I’ve been running this on various types of users on our system and testing it and debugging in order to ensure we get things straight.

I’m proud to announce that tonight the final bugs were worked out, and the new architecture and code were pushed out fully into production for all users. The scripts will need a day to run, and Saturday morning (in the US) you should all receive your first e-mail generated by the new architecture. All users should have pretty accurate stats at that point, but with all new systems I’m sure we’ll have some areas we missed. I’ll be correcting any of these over the coming week. You may notify me via our Twitter @socialtoo account if you have any issues.

Stats E-mails Will Soon Have a One-Time Charge

It has also become evident that in order to keep providing as accurate and reliable stats, we’re going to need to cover the costs of managing such an infrastructure. I want to be sure we are sending accurate e-mails before we do this however. Assuming I am confident your stats e-mails are delivering properly we will, around the beginning of May, charging a 1-time $20 fee to be able to continue receiving the statistics e-mails. This is simply to enable us to continue scaling our server infrastructure and provide you with the most accurate and reliable stats e-mails possible. You pay one time and never have to worry about it again.

Besides providing you with a much more accurate and reliable experience, you can also expect, once we do this, for us to continue to build upon these e-mails. For instance, I am currently talking to Facebook’s policy team to determine what we can and can’t do with these stats on the Facebook platform. We will probably be doing similar with FriendFeed, assuming we can cover our costs for covering all these. When we’re ready to implement the one-time fee I will give you at least a week notice to pay and have your account ready for a seamless transition - I want to be sure you have plenty of time to prepare for this. I will post both here and through an e-mail to all our users when we have a date for that. Auto-Follow, Facebook profile redirects, and SocialSurveys will continue to be free.

SocialToo is about learning more about those you’re connected with. Starting tomorrow, it all gets better as we get back on track with new architecture and new strategy. Here’s to a much better stats experience and a much brighter future for SocialToo! As always, please don’t hesitate to comment if you have any questions or concerns - I welcome your feedback!

I’ll keep you updated as things progress.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

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Larger Users May See Delays

April 14th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

Little Engine That CouldRecently, due to the Twitter Featured Listings on Twitter, several of our users have been approaching up to the millions of followers (Many of the top users on Twitter are using SocialToo! We’re very proud of that), and others in the hundreds of thousands. While we’re very happy for these users, this is a lot of data to process! We think it’s a fun challenge, and are always game for it - we want you to feel confident, that despite the size of your audience, we will be able to continue to provide you top-notch service. Unfortunately, as we work out this challenge some of our larger users, especially those with over 2,000 followers, will see delays in the auto-following we do on their behalf, any catch up services purchased, and numbers in your nightly report e-mails.

No data is being lost in this process, although the dates you see new follows may be off - keep in mind that those dates are reflective of the time we were able to get to your user and when we were able to process those followers. You will probably see gaps, and depending on the size of your follower base those gaps may be larger than others. We try to run this as often and as fast as possible, to make it as real-time as possible. Unfortunately this is more difficult for us with the larger users.

I assure you we’re working on this as fast as we can. If you have less than 2,000 followers you should not be affected - please let me know if you see issues and you have less than 2,000 followers. For those with more, we are aggressively working on this issue, and hope to have a solution up within the week. As always, I’ll keep you up-to-date both here and on our @socialtoo account on Twitter. Please stay tuned and we’ll let you know how we are progressing.

Photo courtesy Kenneth Lu

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We Support Twitter’s Decision

April 1st, 2009 by Jesse Stay

friends_front

Today it was announced by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, that Twitter would be disabling their native auto follow functionality that they were providing to users that requested it. This was simply a decision by Twitter to stop doing a service they were providing on a person-by-person basis who requested it.  It was also very simple auto-follow, with no other services like what SocialToo provides.

We support the decision which Twitter has made. It was not in Twitter’s best interest to be doing auto-follow, when other services such as SocialToo are much further along at enabling features around the functionality.  While we disagree that it is impossible to read Tweets when you are following thousands of people (we suggest using a good UI such as TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, Tweetie, or CoTweet to manage this process), offering plain auto-follow functionality without any safeguards to protect users from gaming Twitter just to gain more followers is a risky business.

SocialToo will be fine after this decision.  Just last night, Twitter gave us an additional whitelisted IP to expand the number of requests we can make for you, and we plan to expand to even more IPs very shortly. Twitter has been very cooperative, and even supportive in this process, and we do not expect that to change.

At the same time, we are also working to improve the process to give our users more flexibility to follow only those they want to follow. In the future if you don’t want to follow people that are following people just for numbers (aka, “gaming” Twitter), you will not have to. If you don’t want to follow people that send auto-DMs, you won’t have to. If you don’t want to follow people that other people deem spammers, you won’t have to.  With technology comes responsibility, and we plan to continue to lead this effort in making Twitter and soon many other networks as clean, and efficient a place to get business done as you can possibly experience.

Auto-follow is also only one piece of functionality SocialToo offers. If you haven’t tried them yet, please sign up to get the nightly stats e-mails. Those are our most popular feature, and go out to near 15,000 people daily.  We’ll be expanding around that even more very soon.  Also, don’t forget to try out our SocialSurveys - poll your friends and initiate discussion around a particular topic, and you can track the results of it all on one page!  Or, link your Facebook account and have a unique URL to point friends to.  Auto-follow is just one of many features we currently offer and will continue to be building.  Our focus has always been educating you about the people you follow on the networks you belong to, and at the same time cleaning up that conversation you have with those friends and followers.

In the meantime, please keep submitting people you see as spammers to the blacklist in your account preferences. As soon as we finish a few preliminary features we’ll be doing something with that over the coming months.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

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Update On Stats and Following Issues

March 26th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

We’ve finally got most of our infrastructure in place to make your stats even more accurate, and to allow us to scale much more moving forward.  At the moment, we’re now experiencing some issues communicating with Twitter, so you may still see some inaccuracies.  We are working with Twitter on the issues, and hope to have this resolved shortly.  After that we should be working better than ever!

We’ll update this blog when we’ve confirmed all is in full working order again and the problems with Twitter are fixed.

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New York Times Features SocialToo - “A Computerized Personal Assistant for Twitter and Facebook”

March 20th, 2009 by Jesse Stay

nytlogo153x23Today Paul Boutin, New York Times reporter for the New York Times Gadgetwise blog featured SocialToo, calling it “A Computerized Personal Assistant for Twitter and Facebook”.  In the article he covered most of the features we offer, describing SocialToo as “an automated valet for your Twitter account.” “Once you’ve set your preferences at SocialToo’s Web site, you can forget about it. That’s the whole idea.” said Boutin.

As sites such as Twitter and Facebook take off, we are seeing incredible growth and buzz about our services.  Articles such as this are just greater evidence that we are making the Social Web a better place for our users.  You can read more of Boutin’s article on the New York Times Gadgetwise blog.

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