The SocialToo Blog

August 30, 2010

Now You Can Check in on Twitter Through Facebook Places

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:02 pm

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Recently Facebook launched the ability for users to checkin to any place with their mobile phone, sharing with their Facebook friends where they are and what they’re doing, but what about their Twitter friends?  Services like FourSquare and Gowalla offer the ability for users to share their checkins to Twitter as well as Facebook (or just leave them on Gowalla or Foursquare).  Facebook, with the exception of Pages, has seemed reluctant to include Twitter syncing for Facebook status updates.  That is where SocialToo comes in.  Starting today, you can now sync your Facebook checkins automatically from Facebook to Twitter using SocialToo.

The feature is completely free for anyone on Twitter and Facebook. To enable the feature, just log in to SocialToo through your Twitter account, click “Settings”, and click “Associate a Facebook Account”. Once you have both a Twitter and Facebook account linked in SocialToo, go back to the “Inbox” tab, and check the box next to “Facebook to Twitter” in the upper-right. You can now check the boxes next to the things you want to share, including, “Autopost Places” to automatically post checkins from Facebook. Once checked, any new checkin you post on Facebook will now go to Twitter.

In addition to checkins, you can also automatically post links and status updates. Any checkin with a note attached will show the note as the text of the Tweet and a link back to the checkin on Facebook. To exclude the checkin from Twitter, just add a “-” after a space at the end of your note and it won’t go to Twitter. The same goes for status updates and links that you post to Facebook.  We are also considering the potential for an opt-in “+” in the future (let us know in the comments if this is interesting to you).

Hopefully some of you find this feature useful.  We think it’s a powerful way to let others know, now on both Twitter and Facebook, where you are and what you’re doing, and has the potential to generate some interesting conversation.  Let us know how you plan to use it!

More about SocialToo:

SocialToo provides features to complement the experience people, businesses, and brands, have on the social networks they participate on. We’re a utility providing tools to help automate the process of managing a brand image, while at the same time enabling users to clean up spammy messaging, track followers and friends, and manage those friends and followers in the process. Here are some of the features we provide:

  • Auto Follow – follow back the people that follow you or your brand, providing potential discovery and networking opportunities, opening up communication channels, and giving those that follow you a sense of belonging in your community
    • Auto Follow is a one-time $10 fee.
  • Automatic DM and Stream filtering – do you get spammy DMs on Twitter? We’ll delete them automatically for you. Set up simple filters with keywords in DMs you don’t want to receive, then set rules, such as “unfollow”, “delete”, or “ignore” to get rid of them. Turn off Twitter’s DM e-mails and turn on ours, and we’ll also respect your rules with the DM e-mails we send, meaning if you say “ignore”, we won’t send you the DMs that match your rules. In addition, you can filter out people that say certain things in your stream, or that Tweet from specific (and some times spammy) applications.
    • DM filtering is free up to 4 filters. Stream and Application filtering comes with the monthly SocialToo Premium plan. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • Bulk Unfollow – need to start over on Twitter? Unfollow all the people you’ve ever followed at once. Set a whitelist under “Friends” and you can exclude specific people as you do so.
    • Bulk Unfollow on Twitter is a one-time $35 fee.
  • SocialToo Stats – one of our most popular features, you get a daily e-mail with all the people that followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter. We try to organize them by the Tweets we detected at the time of the unfollow or follow. We also provide additional information about each person and the ability to unfollow or follow them straight from the e-mail. In addition, for our monthly Premium users we provide an organized interface, showing a timeline of all your new follows and unfollows in a graph, your number of Tweets, and if you click through to any day it will show you the new followers and unfollowers for that day at any point we’ve tracked, along with your Tweets for that day.
    • The daily stats e-mail is a one-time $20 fee. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • SocialToo Surveys – a “Social” way of posting quick polls to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Create a quick poll, and share it with your friends on multiple networks. Your friends can take the poll, share it with their friends, comment on it, or create their own!
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March 9, 2010

March 8, 2010

Enabling Phishing Protection for All SocialToo Users

Filed under: Uncategorized — Jesse Stay @ 8:00 am

I’m proud to announce that along with Friday’s new design and DM inbox launch, SocialToo has officially enabled protection for all 60,000+ users from malicious and phishing DMs that could lead to spammers and hackers stealing users passwords.  Previously we had only enabled this for our users that were using the DM Filters found under “Filters” in the SocialToo interface.  This move is unprecedented, in that we hope this makes Twitter a much safer place.

In the past, as we’ve reported, Twitter has been subject to very large-scale phishing attacks, causing users that clicked on links in DMs to be tricked into providing their Twitter username and passwords.  These accounts would then become compromised, providing an avenue for more spam, often unknown to those whose accounts were compromised.  We’ve found that no one is immune to this, as even some of the largest accounts on Twitter have been subject to such compromise.

Starting today any SocialToo user that logs in through Twitter will have proactive protection on their Twitter account DMs.  We will scan each DM, show the clean DMs in your SocialToo Inbox, and delete and filter out any DMs we detect are malicious.  No DM filters are necessary to protect from truly malicious dms – it all happens automatically for our users.  In addition to deleting the DM from Twitter, we also send a DM on your behalf to @spam on Twitter notifying the Twitter team of the compromised accounts.  We hope that this can help Twitter identify the compromised accounts more easily.  We will also be communicating compromised accounts via other means to Twitter as well.

So far, SocialToo has blocked a total of 19,814 malicious DMs just amongst the 2,000 or so users that have implemented this feature.  We expect this number to get much, much bigger now that 30 times that number are having their DMs filtered.  A fun thing to do is in your SocialToo Inbox, refresh the page and look at the “Total SocialToo DMs filtered to date” number in the lower-right.  You’ll notice it goes up almost every time – that number is accurate!  We also detect these much, much earlier than Twitter is able to.

As has always been a priority, we feel keeping your stream clean and the web in general a cleaner place is important.  Hopefully this makes a significant change in how clean the streams of Twitter users are.  If you have any suggestions on how we can make it even cleaner, drop us a note!

March 5, 2010

A New Way to Manage Your Twitter DMs – The New SocialToo Design

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 8:26 pm

Today we’re launching a huge new redesign for SocialToo where we’re even further continuing our focus to clean up your stream and build better features to help you manage the social networks you belong to. With an entirely new architecture, new design, and lots of new features, we hope you’ll like this one.

New Design

We enlisted the help of Rebecca Servoss, designer of TodaysMama.com, and talented Graphic Designer, to help us every step of the way through this new design.  You’ll notice a much more appealing interface, easier to navigate design, and you’ll notice your settings are right there, front and center for you to change.  From the Inbox to the Surveys and more, you’ll notice a much more fluid experience as you navigate the site.  We hope you’ll spend more time there as your main source to manage the DMs you receive, as well as browse the surveys your friends create.

Filtered Personal Messaging Interface

We’re starting with your Twitter DMs and the SocialToo Surveys your friends create, but you can expect much more here in the future.  Immediately, you’ll notice all your dms in one, nicely formatted UI.  The best part of it all is if you have created a DM filter or two, spammy DMs that meet your filtering requirements will never appear here!  You can always go back to your Spam folder and see the spammy DMs there.  Also, any DM you delete from the SocialToo User Interface will be removed from your main Inbox, but we keep a trash folder as well, so in reality, while it may be gone from Twitter forever, you can always go back later and access it again.

From each DM in your Inbox, you can mark any one of them as spam or auto-dm, and we’ll take appropriate measures to keep similar dms appearing there in the future.  We’ll also unfollow those users as you mark them as such.  You can block the DM sender as well, or delete it right there.

If you want to reply to a DM, just hit the “reply” link underneath the DM in your inbox.  Your response will be logged underneath the DM you responded to – this makes it easier to tell if you responded to the DM or not, and organizes the conversation a little better.

Friend Surveys

Now, in addition to being able to create surveys, take them, and also view them in the new user interface we just launched for SocialToo Surveys, you can now view a full stream of all the surveys your friends have created.  If you’ve logged in through Twitter or Facebook before, we automatically detect all your friends from those networks that are SocialToo users, and their surveys appear right there.  Don’t have anyone appearing?  Invite them to use SocialToo and create some surveys!

In addition to viewing your friends’ surveys, you can, as before, view all the surveys of individual users on SocialToo, comment on the surveys, as well as easily share them on your favorite networks such as Twitter and Facebook.  Polling your friends and fans on the Social Networks you belong to has never been easier!

Whitelisting

We have always had whitelisting on SocialToo, but, we’ll be first to admit the previous design was a little tough to deal with.  Now, if you click on the “Friends” tab, you’ll see a newly revamped whitelist where you can add any of your friends and immediately guarantee they won’t be unfollowed as you filter your dms.  Occasionally even your closest friends can send spammy messages, but adding them to your whitelist ensures they will never be unfollowed.  Or, perhaps you want to run the bulk unfollow tool and there are a few you don’t want to unfollow.  Just add those to your whitelist, and everyone but those friends will be unfollowed.  We think this feature is very useful!

Log in, Check it out!

These new features, and the new design are available starting today!  Please log in, check it out if you haven’t been around in awhile.  See what you’ve been missing.  Subscribe to the daily e-mail stats if you get a chance, or maybe you just want to unfollow all your friends because you previously had auto follow on.    Most of all, create some DMs filters, clean up your stream, and enjoy the new interface to manage the DMs you receive on Twitter.  Play around with the new features and let us know what you think!  It’s all new, so we always expect a few quirks at first – please let us know if you have any issues by e-mailing us at contact@socialtoo.com.

See you on the new interface!  I can’t wait to see some of the new Surveys you create, as well as hear some of your feedback as you navigate your new inboxes and the new way to manage your DMs.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

February 24, 2010

New Variant of “This You???” Worm Surfaces on Twitter

Filed under: Security,Status — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 5:31 am

SocialToo has detected a surge in the number of phishing DMs in just the last few hours or so, all with the text, “This you???”, followed by many different variants of URL shorteners that all redirect to a domain ending in kevanshome.org (DO NOT CLICK! YOU WILL BE TAKEN TO A BEBO-LOOKING PAGE ASKING FOR YOUR BEBO CREDENTIALS – DO NOT LOG IN).

This new variant comes after a slew of phishing DMs over the weekend, all with similar text to this one that utilized a URL redirect service, redirecting users to a bzpharma.net URL asking users to log in with their Twitter credentials.  While we show little sign that the compromised accounts were fixed by Twitter, we did notice that particular variant seems to have stopped, and we have begun to detect some of those compromised accounts sending out Viagara ads in their stead utilizing the same domain name redirect scheme.

All SocialToo users that have either created at least one DM filter under their Preferences, or signed up for the DM e-mails should be protected from this new variant that just started early this morning.  We have blocked over 1,400 DMs so far from this specific variant.  We were able to detect this worm from the first DMs sent out (and have measures in place to automatically detect future variants).  Users that get DMs in other locations should still be suspicious.  While SocialToo deletes the malicious DMs from your account, not all Twitter clients check to see when DMs are deleted.  For this reason we recommend you turn on SocialToo DM e-mails and turn off Twitter’s DM notifications.  SocialToo users utilizing this service will never get a malicious DM from Twitter that we are able to detect.

SocialToo is not a perfect service – there may still be malicious DMs that get through our filters so we encourage all users to be cautious when receiving DMs with links in them.  Look over the domain in the link, verify that you know with absolute certainty that the URL is on twitter.com before providing your credentials.  A good rule of thumb is that if a link from a DM takes you to a Twitter login page, you should probably not provide your credentials.  Instead, manually type in the Twitter.com URL.

We are constantly finding new ways to protect your DMs from Twitter when you utilize the services we provide at SocialToo.  While our service does provide automation tools that increase the number of DMs for some users, these types of attacks often come from your closest friends and family.  No one can be trusted in this case, and we ask that you exercise caution amongst all DMs you receive.  This protection is intended for all users of SocialToo, whether you choose to automate or not – you just need to follow the instructions above to enable the feature.

As always, follow the @socialtoo account on Twitter for updates on the status of this worm and others.  We will also try to keep you updated on this blog as new worms surface.

January 14, 2010

Per Twitter’s Request, We’re Removing Auto Unfollow

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 7:32 pm

We recognize auto unfollow has been an invaluable tool for many of you.  I added it because when I auto-follow, some times later on those people unfollow you again.  Twitter itself has a ratio limit which if you’re following over about 10% of those that are following you back, it will not let you follow anyone else.  So you’re stuck waiting to be able to follow back the people that have made the kind gesture to follow you.  To me it was a relationship building tool.

Twitter it seems thinks otherwise.  Per their request, we have been asked to remove our automatic unfollow service by the end of the month or risk having our service disabled.  They claim that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”.  We want to respect Twitter’s request, as ultimately we are in their environment and subject to their own rules.  So long as we are using their API we have to play by their rules, and I respect that.

We will continue to be able to provide the same anti-spam and anti-phishing services we have been offering, which means you will still be able to automatically unfollow those that send you spam DMs, content with spam in it, and keywords and phrases you find objectionable should you choose to do so.  Our “unfollow all” service will also still remain.  This service enables users to unfollow everyone they’ve ever followed before.

Starting today, we are removing the ability to enable this service from your admin preferences so as no new users can enable the service.  In addition, we have removed the ability to purchase the unfollow catch up option.  Starting February 1, 2010, we are disabling this service forever and you will no longer be able to automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter if you were doing so before.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause – we are as disappointed as you are.  We are still firmly set on our original goals of automating your streams while enabling you to clean them up at the same time and focus on real relationships.  All of our other services are still available and remain to be some of our most popular tools that we offer.  In the meantime, if you do have issues with this, we encourage you to contact Twitter support and let them know of your use-cases for the service.  From my experience Twitter does listen so long as you keep it constructive.

In the meantime, stay tuned – we have some exciting new announcements on the way between now and February!

January 4, 2010

Spreading the Word Through A Unique, Twitter-based Affiliate Program

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 1:43 pm

twitpayJust this last weekend we gave you ways that you could purchase our daily stats e-mail (and soon our other services) for your friends and family as well as yourself.  We’ve seen an increase in sign ups since then, so we know our users love to share.  Today, we’re going to introduce a unique way to reward you for sharing.  Starting today, for each service you refer people to join on SocialToo, we’re going to pay you 20% of the cost of that service via the service TwitPay, right through Twitter!  Here’s how it works:

  • You use one of the links below, replacing the “Jesse” as the value of the twitter_user parameter with your own Twitter screen name, and share that link with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or even your blog or website!
  • When your friends click the link, they’ll be taken to SocialToo, but a special, customized overlay will pop over the main page welcoming them to SocialToo with your Twitter profile image next to the welcome message.  The message tells them about the service you’re trying to refer them to, and invites them to provide their screen name (or a friends!) and enter the purchase process.
  • When your friend or referral has purchased the service you sent them to, we record your Twitter screen name with the purchase
  • At the end of each month we’ll then send you 20% of the purchase price via the service, TwitPay.

It’s that simple!  Using TwitPay and Twitter to manage the affiliate process there are no new accounts to sign up for, nor do you have to re-enter your bank account information for us to know where to push the money.  We simply send you a Tweet saying you get X amount, you click a link, and claim the money we guaranteed for you using your existing Paypal account!

Never before has an affiliate program been so easy.  We love Twitter because it enables simple transactions like affiliate payments to be a simple process.  All you need to know is your Twitter screen name, the link to send your friends, and you’re done!  Thanks to TwitPay for making this easy for us to complement the Social Web, even with our affiliate program.

Here are the links you need to know – remember to replace the “Jesse” with your own Twitter screen name next to the “twitter_user” parameter (click on the links to see what it looks like!):

For now the service applies to referring new users only – we’ll be working on the ability to refer existing users to new services shortly.  We’ll be updating the website soon with this information – for now I hope you’ll go out and share this with more people!

January 1, 2010

Introduce Friends to the New Year With SocialToo

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 9:49 pm

happy-new-year-hat-42009 was a great year for SocialToo!  Besides becoming profitable in 2009, we saw over 50,000 of you join the service, and near 3,000 of you purchase our valuable tools for managing your Facebook and Twitter streams.  Traffic peaked at around 150,000 page views and we’re not even a page-view generating site! (most our traffic happens on the backend where we process your social stream)  We saw coverage from blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb and even the New York Times, and that coverage continues to share the word of what we offer with more people.  We introduced DM filters and the ability to clean up your stream, making us the first, and one of the only services to make Twitter and the Social Streams you belong to cleaner places.

We’ve been able to do this all with just one-time purchases on the services we offer.  While we don’t anticipate that being the only business model for us forever, we do appreciate your support, and we hope to keep a cheap, easy option available for everyone.  Each and every one of you has helped us grow, and keeps us releasing new and better features to complement the experiences you have on the Social Web.  We know you like the service, as most of our traffic comes from word-of-mouth referrals from people like you.  Because of this we’re enabling one more feature for the New Year so you can give this gift to others.  Now you can purchase SocialToo features for your friends!

Starting now, if you click on the “Track” link in the bottom of the home page before you login (do you like our new design?), you’ll see a popover appear.  Just enter the Twitter username of anyone you want to purchase the daily stats e-mail for, pay the $20 through your Paypal account, and voila, when you’re finished just tell that person you created an account for them.  Even if they don’t yet have a SocialToo account, the next time they log into SocialToo through Twitter they’ll see the feature you purchased for them.

We want you to be able to share our best features with others.  The one-time services for life will be there for life, so why not buy one for a friend or coworker or two?  As of the moment this is only available for our daily stats e-mails that show who followed you and who stopped following you on Twitter the day before.  We’ll be adding the ability to add our other services as gifts very shortly, so keep watching.

2010 is the year SocialToo is going to fly!  My hope is, with your support, we can push it further and far beyond what we accomplished in 2009, and continue to bring more useful features to you enabling you to automate better, track better, and most importantly, clean up your stream better.  So if you haven’t thought of it before, think about someone you think that could use the service and share with them this excellent gift for the New Year.

I’d like to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year!  This definitely won’t be the last time you hear from me.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

Screen shot 2010-01-01 at 7.13.21 PM

September 23, 2009

SocialToo Launches Anti-Virus Solution for Twitter

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 6:31 pm

VirusViruses and worms are rampant on the web.  Until only recently this has been a big problem on your PC.  Surely, you wouldn’t think of running your computer without an anti-virus solution, but what about the viruses and worms spreading throughout the social networks you belong to? While they may not directly affect your computer, they can cause just as much damage, including: identity theft, stealing of your private and financial information, takeover of your accounts, and embarrassing situations!

Just today, in fact, a worm is propagating through Twitter direct messages (DMs) trying to trick unsuspecting members into thinking it’s a legitimate message from a friend. Today, we have a solution for that at SocialToo, and we are launching automatic anti-virus solutions for Twitter and other social networks.

Starting now, as part of a new premium service we’re offering, anyone who goes to SocialToo and checks the “Send SocialToo DM e-mails” box will no longer receive malicious DMs we detect as rampant on Twitter, as we will be stopping them at their source.  We’re taking a proactive approach to this now, and all our users will not receive those DMs we’ve confirmed are malicious.  For instance, the “hey. i make $300-500 a day online. this website showed me how” DMs that have been flooding the network over the last few days will automatically be deleted from your Twitter DM box and reported to Twitter’s @spam account on your behalf.  Also, the “rofl, this you on here?” DMs will never show up.

As your companion for the Social Web, one of our main roles is to protect you from getting conned or tricked into clicking on a malicious link and having your account compromised as well.

Here’s what you need to do for it to be most effective:

  • Click “Sign in With Twitter” on SocialToo.com.  Click on the Preferences tab and check the box “Send SocialToo DM e-mails”. Be sure your e-mail address is entered and click “Submit” at the bottom.  It’s now enabled for your account!
  • Go to the “Settings” link in the upper-right hand corner of Twitter.  Click on the “Notices” tab, and uncheck the “Direct Text E-mails” option.  You don’t need this any more because we’ll replace that e-mail with more useful DM e-mails.
  • Go to your Devices tab and turn off device notifications – again, the SocialToo e-mails will replace this – and we’re also working on some better mobile solutions to replace this functionality.

Once you have done all of the above, SocialToo will now be responsible for notifying you of new DMs.  We will not forward those that have known spam or worms or viruses in them, and  you will only get the good DMs.

This new automatic virus detection is free until November 1st for all SocialToo users. We are still working out the details on the new plan, and we will notify each user that has signed up so you can make the choice at that point if you want to continue with the service.  This includes our existing auto-dm and spam service subscribers – again, it’s 100% free until November 1st.

We will need input from our users as you see malicious DMs. Please be sure to add them to your spam keywords as you see them, and we’ll be tracking trends through those keywords.  Also, if you feel it’s of particular importance please let us know by DMing @socialtoo on Twitter or e-mailing us at contact@socialtoo.com.  We’re hoping to make this smarter and smarter as we move forward, and you can expect to see much more from us in the future.

Lastly, if you’re a developer and would like access to any of this information, we do have an API. Contact us to find details. I’d love to work with you to integrate this same spam and virus protection into your own Twitter clients.

It’s time we put an end to worms and viruses on Twitter. You wouldn’t want to be on a PC without anti-virus protection. Why would you be on Twitter without SocialToo?

Consider SocialToo your vaccine for the Social Web.

September 15, 2009

Tag Your Twitter Friends From Facebook With SocialToo Status

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:55 am

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.49 AM

Yesterday Facebook launched their new tagging feature worldwide to their users.  The feature is simple – to tag one of your Facebook friends, you just start typing their name, prefixed by “@”, and their name appears in a drop-down that you can select.  Their name will then be linked to their Facebook profile in their status update on Facebook, and an e-mail sent to that individual to notify them they were tagged.  This also works with the Pages you are a fan of, and applications you use.  As you know though, SocialToo Status has provided friend tagging for several weeks before Facebook announced this new feature.

8234_166968661728_20531316728_3531008_4854752_n

Today I’m happy to announce that we’re enhancing our tagging even further.  Now, no longer do you have to type your friends’ names in the box (in fact, we’ve removed the box).  Now you just have to select the SocialToo Status green quote icon, enter your status update as you normally would, prefixing any names you want to tag with “@”, just like you would with a normal status update, and when you hit submit, those names will automatically appear next to your status update as tagged, just like they used to, but much less effort necessary on your part!

There’s more though.  Now, when you tag your friends on Facebook and enable SocialToo Status, if you check the “Twitter” box, we’ll automatically search SocialToo’s large database of Facebook users with Twitter accounts. If the users you have tagged have already registered their Twitter account with SocialToo and associated that with a Facebook account we will automatically replace the tagged name with their Twitter handle, in @reply fashion to get their attention on Twitter as well!  If the user is not yet in our database we will just put their Facebook name in its place.

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.03 AM

If you ever had a reason to convince your Twitter friends to try SocialToo Status now’s the time!  Be sure to check out our #socialchange contest and you, or they can have the chance to win free status e-mails for life!  We’re continuing to change the Social web landscape with SocialToo – keep sending us your ideas!

You can learn how to enable SocialToo Status on your Facebook account via our earlier blog post.

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