The SocialToo Blog

I created SocialToo to solve problems. I discover things I can’t find on the Social Networks I belong to, and I create them. I then add them into our service to provide one complete companion to all your Social Network needs. On Facebook, we’re providing an easy-to-remember URL that redirects to your Facebook profile (See mine at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com). We’re also providing unique ways to poll your followers through Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed via our SocialSurveys product. These were to first solve my need to constantly have to look up my Facebook profile URL when giving it out to friends and family, and secondly, I needed a way to learn about my followers in a simple manner, initiating discussion around a particular topic that I could then track solid results around. Our nightly statistics e-mails for Twitter were also built around this premise.

For Twitter, as my followers grew, I wanted to show the gesture of at least following those people back that were showing interest in me. It was the least I could do, even if I could not pay attention to each and every one. (We’re working on that second problem)

I began by manually following those that followed me, and when my numbers were still small I would even message them, some times privately, some times publicly to thank them for their interest in me. This became a repetitive process for me, and therefore I wrote a script, and eventually an entire service which became SocialToo.com, around this.

Evidently, many others of you had the same problem, because we took off, really fast. Within just a few months, of over 13,000 of you, almost 8,000 of you are following those that follow you. At the same time, near 6,000 of you are sending DMs to the new people who follow you. Some of those sending DMs are auto-following, some are not. It is clear that people like to show some token of gratitude and maybe a little bit of information to those people that follow them.

However, it seems many people either have not understood the service, or are simply abusing it, as I believe the spammers have started to take over this system. People are complaining. Here are a few examples, with great reasons:

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/social-media-is-no-place-for-robot-behavior/
http://loiclemeur.com/english/2009/02/twitter-robots-killed-me-and-why-i-apologize-i-may-not-be-following-you-anymore.html
http://www.twitterbusinessbook.com/index.php?p=754

Based on my statistics, while a small percent of you are using auto-DMs for legitimate business reasons (for instance, sending instructions to followers if you are doing an online promotion that includes following the Twitter user as part of the promotion), over one-third of you sending automated DMs have some sort of URL in your message to followers. The remaining majority is just sending simple thank you’s, which while I think are truly genuine, are now being ignored by most people that receive them. Some are even going to the extent of deleting all their followers in order to remove this burden.

We provided a way you can block these, both on messages from our site, and on messages from other sites that do this, and proudly, around 1,500 of you have taken advantage of this (500 of those are still sending out auto-dms despite not wanting them for themselves). This has reduced significantly the number of DMs many of you are receiving, both from us and those other sites that do this.

Starting today, we’re taking this one step further. As of this blog post, we are completely disabling auto-DMs to our users’ followers in order to stop this practice and bring back the usefulness of direct messaging again. This is a tough move for me, as many of you are using this service, and I think many don’t really have an issue with these DMs. However, with entrepreneurship comes leadership. As CEO of SocialToo, I’m taking a stand against automated DMs, and hoping other sites that do this will do the same. With what used to be a useful tool, came too much abuse, and someone needs to put an end to it. Until we can come up with a better solution we’re going to put an end to it.

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it – it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, “Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?“, we’ll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically.

This is a big move for us, and my hope is that it will cascade and encourage others doing the same to also remove this option. My other hope is that Twitter will also put in limits to discourage this practice (add it to the Terms of Use?). If you would like to show your support, please feel free to donate via the link at the top of SocialToo.com, sign up and check out our many other services, or contribute new ideas for the service on our GetSatisfaction page – perhaps there’s a way around this we’re not thinking of. Here is a list of all the services we still offer (available in more detail on our About page):

• Auto-Follow those who follow you
• Easy-to-remember Facebook profile redirect URL
• Unfollow filters – specify when to unfollow someone who has been following you
• Twitter Blacklisting – we’ll do something really cool with this shortly
• SocialSurveys – poll your followers on the social networks you belong to
• Nightly Stats E-mails – tell who followed you and stopped following you in a day (our most popular feature!)
• Many more to come shortly!

In the meantime, please feel free to discuss this in the comments. I’m still listening, and if your for, or against this, I want your feedback – do you have any ideas on how we can re-enable this in a way that doesn’t offend others? Would it be better we re-enable this in the future, requiring users to pay for it? What other ideas do you have, and is this the right move? I want your suggestions!

(Photo Courtesy Marshall Astor)