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
Recently, 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.