Status on Daily E-mails, New Rate Coming Soon
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
Hey! I love social too and I subscribed to it but the script isn't following people who follow me or removing people who don't follow. I e-mailed you guys. Can you help me out?
Comment by Queen of the Click — April 25, 2009 @ 12:45 pm
The problem with auto-follow is almost always due to your Twitter
credentials being incorrect. Can you re-enter your Twitter credentials and
let me know if within 24 hours it doesn't auto-follow for you?
Comment by jessestay — April 25, 2009 @ 12:49 pm
[...] fine the past week or so, but was extremely glitchy for most of April. To be fair, they have been working on upgrades, and this in part explains the new monetization, but downtime is [...]
Pingback by SocialToo To Begin Charging For Daily Email Notices | Twittercism — May 5, 2009 @ 12:50 pm
[...] Last week we announced soon we would be implementing a new, one-time rate plan for our nightly stat … 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. [...]
Pingback by Striving to Provide a Better SocialToo - New Rates Take Effect May 11 | The SocialToo Blog — May 5, 2009 @ 12:53 pm