The SocialToo Blog

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

June 1, 2009

Cut Down on Spam With Lists and Filters on SocialToo

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 3:51 pm

SpamWe’ve talked here before about SocialToo’s commitment to providing you with a much cleaner experience on the Social Networks you belong to. We’ve provided an opt out of auto-dms through perhaps the largest source of these, TweetLater (and we thank them for providing that tool!). We’ve enabled you to blacklist people you don’t want us to ever follow on your behalf. We’ve enabled you to automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter. We’ve also enabled you to just unfollow those that unfollow you within a given number of days on Twitter.

Today I’d like to take that a little further. Starting now, you can log into SocialToo, click on the Preferences tab, and click on “Unfollowing Preferences” in the left navigation menu. You’ll notice your blacklist has moved there, along with 2 new lists. The first list, a whitelist, enables you to specify individuals you want to be sure we never unfollow for you. Consider this your “favorites” list – trust me, this will become even more useful very shortly, but for now it means even with auto-unfollow on or any of the filters or blacklisting on, we’ll never unfollow the people in that list.

Unfollowing Preferences

The second new list is an “auto-dmers” list. We want you to use this. This is your list, and only applies to you – we can’t make this decision for you. If you’re as annoyed with automatic direct messaging on Twitter as many on Twitter are getting, we’ve provided you a way to ensure these users are unfollowed, identified, and never followed again until they’re removed from the list. Why not just unfollow them, you may be asking?

Here’s the reason. When you add someone to your auto-dmers list, we give those users a score. The higher the score, the more users have been annoyed by their activity. We can’t tell 100% that these people are manually or automatically sending these, so we have to go by you, the user’s annoyance level. If they annoy you enough to unfollow them, we think that warrants an increase in their auto-dm score. We’ve done the same with your blacklist. The more people that blacklist an individual, the higher their “spam score”. This is an anonymous score that only we know, and is entirely controlled by our users. We have no control as to what goes into this list.

Now here’s the fun part. You’ll notice above those 3 lists a few new filters. You still have the ability to unfollow those who unfollow you, unfollow those who unfollow you in a given number days after they follow you, or do nothing at all with those unfollowers. However, we’ve added 2 new filters that I think are very powerful, especially the more people use them and populate their lists.

Now, if you check the boxes, “Never follow if friends have a spam score greater than [3]” or “Never follow if friends have an auto-dm score greater than [2]” we do some additional magic. If someone has been blacklisted by greater than 3 people on SocialToo (you can change this number), we’ll automatically unfollow them for you and never follow them again. If someone has been marked as an auto-dmer by more than 2 people (you can also change this number), we’ll automatically unfollow them for you and never follow them again as well. Change the numbers, and we’ll follow and unfollow accordingly.

We’ve just given complete control to you, the user, to determine who on Twitter is a spammer, and who is not. We’ve even automated the process for you and you can now choose to only follow those other users have not considered to be spamming, or auto-dming (assuming you consider that is spam) on Twitter. Have an exception to the rule? Just add them to your whitelist!

We have several more announcements this week we’ll be rolling out shortly so please stay tuned to this blog as we announce them. Most of all, we need your help spreading the word to get as many people populating these lists as possible so the system becomes as useful as can be. It’s 100% free so please fill out your lists, set your filters, and enjoy as your spam loads go down significantly. Most importantly, spread the word!

UPDATE: The blacklist, auto-dm list, and whitelist features are now under a sidebar link called “Lists”.  We have moved the rest of the unfollowing preferences under the main “Preferences” tab.

May 4, 2009

Throttle The Number of People We Follow Per Day

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 5:25 pm

I’m excited to announce a simple new feature that may make your life a little easier if you’re trying to catch up your followers, or simply have a lot of people we follow on your behalf per day on Twitter. You’ll now notice under your Preferences tab, under the check box to enable auto follow, there is now a drop-down with the number of maximum people we will follow on your behalf per day. Select a number that works for you (Twitter only allows a maximum of 1,000), and we’ll make sure we don’t go over your limit.

We enabled this due to request by some of you. It should be useful especially to those of you which want to manually follow a few per day without hitting Twitter’s 1,000 per day limit while we catch up your account for you. Or it could serve as a safety-net just to be sure you’re not following too many people at once.

Whatever your reason now you have some flexibility in the number of people we follow for you per day. I think some of you will really like this.

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 29, 2009

Get Your Follows and Replies Immediately With E-mail Forwarding

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 3:29 pm

At SocialToo, it has always been my goal to make following the people you want to follow as seamless an effort as possible. In my own opinion, you should not have to do anything to have us follow those that follow you, send automatic reply dms on your behalf, etc. However, there are some which want their replies and follows to be much more immediate. With the recent Twitter API limits, this simply isn’t possible to enable immediate follows and replies, and still do everything with no effort on your behalf (at least currently), so today, we’re providing another option for you.

Starting now, you can start forwarding your new follow e-mails from Twitter to the address, “autofollow@socialtoo.com”, and for every e-mail we receive, we’ll auto-follow that individual in the e-mail for you. In addition, if you have auto-dms enabled in your Admin preferences for Twitter, we will also send them the auto dm you specified in your preferences. So all you need to do to get immediate follows is set up an automatic rule in your e-mail client to forward those e-mails to us, and we’ll do the following for you. Note that you must have an account with SocialToo, and must have provided at least your Twitter username and password for it to work.

We’re providing this service as a convenience to you, and also as an easy way for those of you already using other services that provide this feature to easily transfer to SocialToo. If you use a competing service, simply change the e-mail address for that competing service’s auto follow e-mail filters to “autofollow@socialtoo.com”, and, assuming you already have an account with us, SocialToo will automatically start following those that follow you immediately. This does not affect your auto unfollow settings – you must set those up separately in your Admin preferences.

At the same time, if you don’t want to do anything, your automatic follow will still work on your behalf, no e-mail forwards needed on your part. This is just a way to make your auto-follows and replies a little more instantaneous. Interestingly, we did notice that, assuming we were able to run our auto follow scripts faster, our scripts detect your new follows even faster than Twitter can send out new follow e-mails for. Unfortunately we aren’t able to run them fast enough, yet, which is why we’re providing this service. Now you have just one more way to follow those who follow you, even more immediately than before.

I’ve been told this doesn’t work on AOL mail or Hotmail, but here is how you can set up an e-mail forward on Gmail:

1. Click on “Create Filter” to the right of the search box at the top

2. In the “From” field, enter “twitter.com”

3. In the “Subject” field, enter “is now following you on Twitter”

4. Click “Next Step”

5. On the following page, make sure “Skip the Inbox”, “Mark as read”, “Forward it to”, and “Never send it to Spam” are all checked.

6. In the “forward it to” box (it should be checked), enter, “autofollow@socialtoo.com” (without the quotes)

7. Click “Create Filter”

8. You’re Done! We’ll start auto following those that follow you immediately after we get your e-mail. Or, if you turn this filter off, we’ll continue to do it in the background on a slower, more paced, basis.

As always, if you see any problems with the service don’t hesitate to contact me, personally, at contact@socialtoo.com.

January 21, 2009

The Game Must Go On

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 11:59 pm

With all the chatter about API rate limits lately our users have to be wondering how things are going to progress. The answer is, “as usual”, but with a few caveats. Due to the new rate limit limitations imposed by Twitter, for the next little bit we are moving from processing 250 users all simultaneously to give you near instantaneous results, to processing 4,000 users at a time, simultaneously. Our hope is that this decreases the amount of traffic we make on Twitter’s servers, while still ensuring you can receive your nightly stats e-mails.

What this means for you

This means that instead of near instantaneous (up to 3 hours previously, but most were pretty soon after the follow) auto-following and un-following, our measurements are showing anywhere from 6-8 hours between follows. This will affect the following:

  • auto-replies — your replies to new followers could be up to 8 hours after they follow you. This should be okay, as your replies will look more genuine and less automated by waiting to send them, we believe.
  • nightly e-mails — some of your new followers and unfollowers from the previous day will not appear in the nightly e-mail if we send out the e-mail before the script is run next to read your new followers. In addition, your last Tweet may not be as reliable, as it could be up to 8 hours old. We will work to find ways to remedy this.
  • unfollow filters — we suggest you increase your unfollow day limit to at least one more day beyond what it is now. This will ensure with the longer runs that we still unfollow the spammers that unfollow you briefly after following you.

The short plan

Our first priority is to wait and find out what tools Twitter is willing to give us to determine rate limit, whether they are willing to work with us (over the last 2 weeks they haven’t) to reduce the number of requests we have to make to obtain your list of followers, and then adjust accordingly to try and increase the number of people we can process in a short amount of time. If we can do this, we’ll continue to improve features on this front and won’t need the long plan.

The long plan

If we are unable to increase the number of people we can process in a short amount of time, we will still keep the service running, but we will need to come up with other options around the service. Expect to see auto-following around the service FriendFeed soon, as well as stats around that service as well as Facebook and other services.

As always, we will continue to expand the SocialSurvey options, and that will be unaffected by any of this. Expect more features around the surveys, as well as perhaps some new tools we’ll build, taking into consideration Twitter’s new API limits. We are SocialToo, and not just TwitterToo – our goal is to complement the entire social web and not just Twitter! We hope to begin expanding on that soon.

In the meantime, stay tuned here and we’ll keep you updated of new announcements and product updates. Our traffic still continues to surge and users continue to join regardless today, and we hope that continues moving forward. Many experts, books, and blogs are still suggesting others join Twitter and use SocialToo to help manage their followers. We hope to continue to make Twitter an easier place to build a network and establish real-life relationships, regardless of the limits Twitter places on us to do so. We are still accepting advertisers and building our own monetization strategy to ensure we can continue to support you, our users and provide many more features down the road. Our end goal, as always is pleasing you, our users and we aim to do that, regardless of what limitations we are given. With today’s challenges, Twitter has made their pitch – now we must step up to the plate and hit a home run!

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