The SocialToo Blog

March 9, 2010

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 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!

September 3, 2009

SocialToo Extends War on Twitter Spam With One-Click DM Management

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 3:02 pm

A few weeks ago I pledged to provide more ways for you to filter the automated DMs you were receiving on Twitter.  For many, this annoyance has driven them to the point of completely unfollowing their friends (which SocialToo has a tool for).  To me, the ideal auto-follow tool should foster real-life relationships, and keep out the fake ones.  For many people, auto-following introduces too much clutter, and can reduce the quality of the real-life relationships you’re trying to build on the social networks.  One of our main focuses at SocialToo has always been to clean up the clutter.  That’s why, starting now, we’re launching some new tools around this that will help you remove the spam entirely from your inbox.

Today we’re declaring war on Twitter spam.

Introducing SocialToo DM E-mails

Starting right now, you can log into SocialToo.com by clicking on the “Sign in with Twitter” link on the home page. On your Preferences page you’ll see a few more options to help you combat spam on your Twitter account.  The first item we’re launching is a DM e-mail that can replace the DM e-mails you’re receiving from Twitter.  Here’s the cool thing about it: there’s nothing you need to do on your part to get it working! That’s right, no forwarding e-mails, and no changing anything in your Twitter preferences.  Simply check the box, “Send SocialToo DM e-mails” and include your e-mail address on your Preferences page on SocialToo, and the next DM you receive will come straight to your e-mail inbox.

socialtoo-dm-e-mail-preferences

Now, every DM e-mail you receive will enable you options to flag that DM as spam.  You’ll have the option to flag the sender as a spammer, auto-DMer, block the user, or just unfollow them.  You can even respond via public reply or DM, or even delete the DM straight from the e-mail!  Even more, when you mark a user as a spammer, a message automatically gets sent (via DM) to @spam on Twitter notifying them as well.  And now that they’re marked as a spammer, you’ll never auto-follow them again, and it will help others with the right preferences in SocialToo to avoid following them as well.

socialtoo-dm-e-mail-format

Should you later want to remove them from your spammers list,  just go to the “Lists” option in the left navigation on your Preferences page and you can remove and add people to your spammers and auto-DMers lists easily.  You can also whitelist anyone and we’ll never unfollow the people on that list on your behalf.  You may also want to enable the option, “Delete DMs when users are unfollowed, marked as a spammer, auto dmer, or are blocked from the DM e-mails” on your Preferences page – with that enabled, we’ll also delete each DM after you mark them as a spammer or unfollow them from the DM e-mails you get.

pointing-out-socialtoo-lists

Spam Filtering – the Perfect Complement to DM E-mail

DM E-mail from SocialToo is just one part of combating spam from those you follow, and discouraging the practice as you go. With this new feature, we’re also launching another new feature, automated spam filters, that will help you completely remove the spam and automated DMs you receive on Twitter.  Here’s how it works:

Log into SocialToo.com through the sign in with Twitter link and go to your Preferences tab.  On that tab towards the bottom you’ll see a new “Automatic DM Filters” section.  This, with the SocialToo DM E-mail, are your friend when it comes to stopping DM spam you receive on Twitter.

automatic-dm-filters

The way it works is that for every keyword or phrase (keywords and phrases are exact, so including a quote or punctuation will search for DMs with that quote or punctuation) you add to your DM filters, we’ll process that DM, apply the actions you select (unfollow, mark as spam, mark as auto-DM, delete) for the DMs that match that rule, notify @spam via DM if they’re a spammer, and they will not be included in the next e-mail you receive from us.  So, if you disable the DM E-mails you receive from Twitter in your preferences on Twitter.com and enable the SocialToo DM e-mail instead, you now have the potential to completely rid yourself of spam DMs from others, with little to no effort on your part.

So to get started adding filters simply click the “add keyword” link under your DM filters section on your Preferences page at SocialToo.com, enter a keyword or phrase you want to have it search for, set the actions you want to occur for that phrase, hit submit, and you’re done!  Some keywords I’ve set up include (without the quotes) “thanks for following”, “thank you for following”, and “You should send me a gift back”.  You can add as many of these filters as you like and we’ll stop each and every DM that meets those terms from entering your inbox.  I should also add that you do not have to auto-follow for any of the features we are launching today to work.  These features will work for anyone, and they’re 100% free!

Today is the day DM spam on Twitter stops for our users. We’re proud to play a part in that process at SocialToo.  This is only the beginning though.  We will continue to improve this process, listen to your feedback, and hopefully apply this to other networks you belong to as well in the future.  We’ll continue to find new ways for you to remove these DMs from your workflow.  If you have ideas, suggestions, or questions, we’re all ears.  And if you’re a developer we may be able to work with you as well to integrate these tools into your own product, perhaps enabling you to know before presenting DMs to a user if they pass a SocialToo spam test first.  The possibilities are endless!

I look forward to hearing your feedback.  These features are completely free.  If you do like what we’re offering though, we also provide a nightly report of who followed you and stopped following you within the previous day.  The cost is just a 1-time $20 charge for life, and you can turn it on or off any time you like.  SocialToo is your companion, and friend, to the social web.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

July 21, 2009

April 1, 2009

We Support Twitter’s Decision

Filed under: Coverage — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:43 am

friends_front

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

January 10, 2009

Fight Twitter Spam With Unfollow Filters

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 5:22 am

At SocialToo, my biggest priority is to do all that we can to make Twitter a better, more “social” place for you.  Our goal is to do all we can to enable you to focus on connecting with your friends and building relationships, while we handle the rest.  Unfortunately, with those that abuse the system and seek to solely focus on gaining followers, it gets harder to do so.

One of the most heavily-used techniques for gaining followers by spammers is to follow people on Twitter, then, quickly unfollow them once those people auto-follow them back.  Some people do this via services like SocialToo.com, while others do it manually, but regardless, it’s easy to gain a lot of followers you could potentially target for spam in the future using this technique.  I’ve referred to this flaw in Twitter’s system a “free no-reply address” given to each user that joins Twitter.

Last week we launched a feature enabling you to block automatic DMs from other SocialToo accounts.  Through this feature, only those that want to receive auto-generated DMs will receive them, providing more targeted marketing, and less unwanted messages for those that are annoyed by the feature.  Tonight, I’m proud to announce a new feature that will further this effort to ward off spam on Twitter. I think this is game changing.

Starting tonight, if you log into your SocialToo.com account and click on the “Admin” tab, you’ll see a new link on the left titled, “Unfollowing Preferences”.  You still have the usual features of being able to unfollow all those that unfollow you, or just leave them alone, but we’re adding one new feature.  Now, if you opt to enable it, you can specify that we unfollow anyone who unfollows you within the first “x” number of days after they follow you.  We default this to 1, as that is common for spammers, but you can fine-tune it for your needs.

Also starting tonight, we are defaulting this to “on” for all new SocialToo.com users in an effort to further fight these types of spamming efforts on Twitter.  Existing users will keep their existing settings, so please go in and adjust this if you are already a user.  We plan on expanding this even further in the future with some free, and possibly some premium features, but now you can feel safe that, so long as you and your friends are on SocialToo, Twitter will be a less-spammy place!  So go out and invite your friends, encourage them to switch to SocialToo.com to discourage these spammers from using this technique. The more of you that use SocialToo, the more effective we will be at fighting this technique!

Photo Credit: freezelight

January 9, 2009

SocialToo.com Values Your Security!

Filed under: Security — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:26 pm

One of the most frequent questions we’ve had recently is regarding the security of SocialToo, and if you store your password with us, will it remain secure?  As you may already know, various phishing attacks have made their way around Twitter recently, and have put the issue of password security, in particularly around third-party apps, at the top of everyone’s minds.  As always, we continue to recommend you be careful who you share your password with, always check the URL of the site you are entering your password on, and change your passwords frequently.  Another good rule of thumb is to not use the same password on less-secure websites like Twitter as you would on a more secure website such as your bank.

While Twitter has not pointed the finger at any third party apps for these phishing attacks and hacks, they have made known that the issue is specifically related to a hosting provider that we at SocialToo.com are not using (We use Amazon EC2 services for all our servers).  Regardless, we do take your security seriously.  Here are some of the things we are doing to ensure you are in the most secure environment possible:

Frequent Database Reviews

At SocialToo, we review your data frequently, while maintaining your anonymity.  We are doing our best to monitor various worm and hacker threats, and search frequently to ensure that your accounts have not been compromised.  We are also keeping an open dialogue with Twitter.  Were Twitter ever to catch something we had missed and notify us, we would correct the issue, immediately.  As of this moment, not a single account on SocialToo has been compromised, and it would be quite hard to do so.  We ask for a separate username and password beyond your Twitter username and password (or other social network) just to protect you from that.  This way, were your Twitter account to be compromised, your SocialToo.com account could not also be compromised.

Vocal Advocates of Secure Authorization Technologies

For those that know me personally, you may have read some of my blog posts recently on the subject.  I still argue that Twitter’s acceptance of OAuth would have stopped the phishing attacks seen recently.  While I agree it won’t stop all phishing attacks, it would prevent apps such as SocialToo.com from being the cause of such attacks.  We are one of the most vocal advocates on the Twitter developer mailing lists and elsewhere, and will continue to be a supporter of this, and other secure technologies.  Twitter’s requiring developers to collect plain-text usernames and passwords is unacceptable in our minds, and the minute Twitter changes this, we will convert immediately so your data remains secure.

Continued Monitoring of Customer Complaints

Another thing that sets us apart from other services is we monitor your complaints and suggestions, religiously.  It doesn’t matter if you address us or not, we are tracking mentions of our name, so if anyone mentions we could be the cause of such a phishing attack, we monitor each and every one of those complaints.  To this date, every one of those complaints has been unfounded.  We believe in personal service here, and my hope is that we can continue that personalized service as long as we are capable. If someone suggests we’re the cause of a phishing attack, or hacking attack and you question that, please do not hesitate to contact me personally at jesse@socialtoo.com.

Vocal Advocates of Source Detection Technologies

Another cause we are fighting for at SocialToo is to have Twitter enable clients to provide their source with DMs they send on behalf of users.  Ideally, when OAuth is implemented, this should be a required feature, but for now we’ll accept optional.  While we realize this will not stop Phishing, it will enable us to ensure you know which DMs are coming from our service (we will send it with 100% of the DMs we send on behalf of our users), and if anyone spoofs our name, or compromises our users accounts, we can know immediately.  It will also give you, the user a little more information regarding where DMs you receive come from.  If you think this is a good idea, would you please @reply @ev, @biz, and/or @al3x at Twitter and let them know you would like to see this?  Tag it #dmsource so we can track it. We will be creating a bug for this shortly and you can star that when it is ready to show your support as well.

As you can see, we’re doing all we can to ensure your data is secure.  I’m confident it will remain so, and you can feel confident in that.  It’s a shame that we as app developers have to defend this stance, but I am confident Twitter and other social websites will do the right thing by implementing secure auth standards in the near future.  When they do, we’ll be right there along with them.

(BTW, I’m creating a new category for this for Security – I’m sure this won’t be our last post about security!)

Image Credit: Miles Cox

January 5, 2009

The First of Many

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 7:45 pm

Yes, SocialToo has a blog! I needed a place for us to post status updates, react to public concern, post announcements, etc., so I finally took the plunge and created this thing. My hope is that we can also build community around this blog, so please make your thoughts known, and get to know one another! Welcome! In the meantime, please follow us on Twitter, @socialtoo, or you can always contact me through @JesseStay. We love to hear from you!

Powered by WordPress