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
Today 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.