The SocialToo Blog

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.

August 2, 2009

There’s an App for That

Filed under: Announcements,Status — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 5:09 pm

Swiss Army KnifeHalf of SocialToo’s focus has always been to reduce the spam and clear out the noise for you on the Social Networks you belong to. Recently, a trend has been to unfollow everyone on your followers list and start fresh.  Many people are reporting this has cleaned up things for them and made their life much easier so they could more effectively listen to the conversation.  We support that decision – we are not an “auto-follow company”.  We’re an analytics and anti-spam through social tools company, so auto-follow is only one of the features SocialToo offers.  For those that want to unfollow everyone they follow, yes, there’s an app for that, too.

To unfollow everyone you follow, just go to your Preferences tab, make sure you’re logged into Twitter, and purchase the item, “Unfollow EVERYONE you’re currently following?”.  It’s a one-time only $25 charge and you can run it for free as many times as you want after that. In under 5 minutes, your entire list will be unfollowed.

unfollow all option

There’s more. If you like to auto-follow but don’t like auto-dms, we offer options for that as well.  If you see an auto-dmer, go to the “Unfollowing Preferences” link on your Preferences page, and be sure to blacklist them.  Then, enable the unfollow filters on that page to automatically unfollow those that meet your criteria for auto-dmers. Power by the masses will keep the auto-dmers out.  In addition, we’ll automatically send a request on your behalf to TweetLater’s @optmeout to keep their auto-dms from hitting your inbox if you select the checkbox on your Preferences page.  Anyone you don’t want it to unfollow, just add them to your whitelist.

Of course, you’ll want to tell others about this so more people are marking spammers and auto-dmers as such. Please send out a Tweet to your followers, letting them know about these features and maybe pointing them to this blog post.  In addition, starting today, we launched a way for you to invite your Facebook friends as well.  If you are logged in via Facebook (just click the connect via Facebook button), you’ll see an “Invite Friends” link at the top.  Click that any time and you’ll be presented with a list of all your Facebook friends, giving you the option to invite them to use SocialToo.

Invite friends

Starting this week, I’m going to be focusing on even better filters for SocialToo auto follow.  Expect to see filters around allowing you to auto-unfollow people that DM you with DMs that contain certain keywords.  Expect to see ways to auto-unfollow people with certain keywords in their bio, or with default avatars, or even with certain words in their username.  It’s time to put an end to spam on Twitter, and SocialToo is going to do all we can to help you out in this process.  Yes, we have an app for that, too.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

April 24, 2009

Status on Daily E-mails, New Rate Coming Soon

Filed under: Announcements,Status — Tags: , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:11 am

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

April 14, 2009

Larger Users May See Delays

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 7:53 pm

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

March 26, 2009

Update On Stats and Following Issues

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:56 am

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.

March 18, 2009

Stat E-mails Delayed

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:01 pm

It would appear that with the additional data we are needing to process with the new e-mail format, we’re running into some issues with our database server during the processing. This is leading to a delay in the e-mails going out today. You should receive your e-mails by end of today – we’ll keep you updated here if that changes.

February 8, 2009

We’re Back!

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 1:37 am

Starting tonight, you should start receiving your nightly e-mail reports again. Tonight’s e-mail reports will be accurate as of 10:30am MST this morning. We have put in place new features of the Twitter API that should allow us to run more frequently, and with much more accurate results. In addition, we’ve put in place measures that should keep those that change their Twitter username from inaccurately re-appearing on your list of follows and/or unfollows. We have also put in safeguards that should make sending an auto-reply to any particular user more than once completely impossible.

As with all apps now on the Twitter platform, we are still subject to rate limits on the number of times we can request from the Twitter API, and because of that, your “last tweet” will not be 100% accurate, but it is a good estimate, and should be able to help you look through your Tweets around that time to verify what you were talking about.

Auto follow/unfollow, and auto-dm have all been working for most of the day now, so you should be back to normal. If you continue to see any issues, as always, don’t hesitate to contact us at contact@socialtoo.com.

February 7, 2009

Where are my E-mails?

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:52 am

You may have noticed your e-mails haven’t been sent the last couple nights. Today your auto-following may not have been functional. We are currently doing maintenance to improve the experience around the E-mail reports, auto-following, and auto-DMs. We have temporarily turned off the nightly e-mails because of this. We’re getting ready to turn back on the auto-following and auto-dms, so please sit tight and you’ll see it working better than ever very shortly! We’ll post another announcement tomorrow about the upgrades we’re making, and why they’re good for you. Your e-mails will be back tomorrow night, we promise!

January 18, 2009

“Twitter Problems”

Filed under: Status — Tags: , , — Jesse Stay @ 10:20 am

All Twitter related services, except surveys are down temporarily right now due to problems with Twitter. We are working with them on the issue and will let you know when they are back up. Stay tuned here for updates.

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