stats « The SocialToo Blog

March 9, 2010

Stats, Tweet History, Filters, Multiple Twitter Account Support, and More!

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: multiple twitter account, socialtoo, stats, stream filters, tweet history, twitter backup, twitter filters — Jesse Stay @ 3:32 pm

As you can tell we’ve been busy lately at SocialToo. Today I’d like to announce some of perhaps our most significant features yet. The most significant of those features being the introduction of a new Premium program which monthly paying subscribers can participate in.

SocialToo Premium

Starting today, if you log into SocialToo.com you should be prompted to upgrade. You can also click on the big “UPGRADE” tab in the upper right in the SocialToo dashboard. Today we’re introducing a new $29.95/month subscription plan (free for 7 days) that will enable us to provide continued premium features for just our subscribers. Right now these include a new Stats interface, multiple Twitter account support, and better ways of filtering out your spammy friends, but in the future you can expect better survey features included as part of this, even more filters, more ways to automate, all just to those that subscribe.

Our Free plans still exist – if you choose not to be part of this program, just click “Please do not show this again” when you are prompted to upgrade and you’ll still get all the same features you always enjoyed. In addition, our lifetime, one-time purchases for the auto follow catch up, daily stats e-mails, and bulk unfollow, all still exist, and you can still purchase them. We are, however, starting today, increasing the price of each of our one-time features. The auto-follow catch up is now $10 for life. The daily e-mail is now $40 for life. The bulk unfollow is now $50 for life. Those all remain, in case you only want a feature or two. We may still add more in the future.

New, Powerful Stats Interface!

You asked for it, you got it! Now, just for SocialToo Premium users you have access to a very powerful new stats UI that includes new follows, new unfollows, total follows, net follows, as well as total and new Tweets, all presented in a nice line graph over time. You can show as far back as you need if you want to show stats over time. In addition, if you click through to any specific day on your timeline you can see the individual Tweets for that day, along with exactly who followed you and unfollowed you. You can go back as far as we have been able to track and do this! So, in essence, for those that sign up for SocialToo Premium, we are also now backing up your Tweets for you and organizing them on a day-by-day basis that you can refer back to any time. I think that’s valuable.

Stats start accruing the minute you sign up for SocialToo Premium, so if you’re not seeing anything at first, wait a day or two and those graphs will start filling up. If you are already a daily e-mail subscriber, we’ve already been tracking stats for you, and you probably already see information in there. Try out the 7 day free trial to see what I mean!

Multiple Twitter Account Support

This has been perhaps one of our most requested features. Now our Premium subscribers can have it! Just upgrade your account, and now when you mouse over your name in the upper-left, you’ll have the option to add additional Twitter accounts. Add as many Twitter accounts as you like and you can manage them all right there! No need to log out and log back in for each account you manage – just mouse over the name, select the Twitter account you want to manage, and it switches for you automatically!

Here’s my favorite part: SocialToo Premium subscribers get all these premium features for every single Twitter account they manage. You can manage stats across all your accounts, add filters that work for all your Twitter accounts at once, as well as enable auto follow or daily e-mails for each account you manage, or even just one or two. Right now there are no limits, so add away, and enjoy the features we offer! I hope this makes you a bit more productive in automating, tracking, and cleaning your Twitter stream.

New Filters

Starting today, new SocialToo Premium subscribers can access new filters. In addition to DM filters that free subscribers can already use and the free phishing protection, we’re now providing content and source filters our premium subscribers can use to unfollow, block, or just filter out the people they follow on Twitter. After upgrading, just go to the Filters tab, go to the content or source filters sub-option, and start adding some filters and actions. If someone Tweets from a specific app you can now unfollow based on that app. If you don’t want to follow people that mention specific terms, you can now unfollow or block people based on those terms. In addition, while free subscribers only have access to 4 DM filters per account, SocialToo Premium users have access to unlimited DM filters. Add as many as you like! Oh, and there will be many more filters coming soon!

One-Time Features

Right now Premium subscribers have access to all the one-time features you can purchase on a one-by-one basis. Need to catch up your auto follow? No need to purchase an additional service. Need daily stats e-mails with a list of those who follow and unfollow you? Those are included as well. If you ever need to unfollow everyone and start over on any of your Twitter accounts, that’s included as well. We thought we’d make this nice and easy for you by not having to worry which features you need to purchase.

As I mentioned, for our existing customers, no need to worry – the features you purchased still work and aren’t going away. In fact you can still purchase these features on a one-by-one basis. We just thought this would provide an easier solution for you to manage it all and get some additional, very useful new features along the way.

Much, Much More!

With your support, these monthly Premium subscriptions are going to allow us to continue adding more powerful features. We already have several being tested as we speak, and much more to come. Expect more across Facebook and other social networks. Most of all we want to hear from you! Especially if you’re a Premium Subscriber, please let us know what you would like to see moving forward. This is our most significant update yet, I can’t wait to see what else we’re going to bring to the table!

Log in, and go here to upgrade your account immediately for free! You can of course cancel any time, and the first 7 days are free!

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

Comments (0)

January 1, 2010

Introduce Friends to the New Year With SocialToo

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: 2010, gift, new year, nightly email, premium features, share services, stats — Jesse Stay @ 9:49 pm

2009 was a great year for SocialToo! Besides becoming profitable in 2009, we saw over 50,000 of you join the service, and near 3,000 of you purchase our valuable tools for managing your Facebook and Twitter streams. Traffic peaked at around 150,000 page views and we’re not even a page-view generating site! (most our traffic happens on the backend where we process your social stream) We saw coverage from blogs like Mashable and TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb and even the New York Times, and that coverage continues to share the word of what we offer with more people. We introduced DM filters and the ability to clean up your stream, making us the first, and one of the only services to make Twitter and the Social Streams you belong to cleaner places.

We’ve been able to do this all with just one-time purchases on the services we offer. While we don’t anticipate that being the only business model for us forever, we do appreciate your support, and we hope to keep a cheap, easy option available for everyone. Each and every one of you has helped us grow, and keeps us releasing new and better features to complement the experiences you have on the Social Web. We know you like the service, as most of our traffic comes from word-of-mouth referrals from people like you. Because of this we’re enabling one more feature for the New Year so you can give this gift to others. Now you can purchase SocialToo features for your friends!

Starting now, if you click on the “Track” link in the bottom of the home page before you login (do you like our new design?), you’ll see a popover appear. Just enter the Twitter username of anyone you want to purchase the daily stats e-mail for, pay the $20 through your Paypal account, and voila, when you’re finished just tell that person you created an account for them. Even if they don’t yet have a SocialToo account, the next time they log into SocialToo through Twitter they’ll see the feature you purchased for them.

We want you to be able to share our best features with others. The one-time services for life will be there for life, so why not buy one for a friend or coworker or two? As of the moment this is only available for our daily stats e-mails that show who followed you and who stopped following you on Twitter the day before. We’ll be adding the ability to add our other services as gifts very shortly, so keep watching.

2010 is the year SocialToo is going to fly! My hope is, with your support, we can push it further and far beyond what we accomplished in 2009, and continue to bring more useful features to you enabling you to automate better, track better, and most importantly, clean up your stream better. So if you haven’t thought of it before, think about someone you think that could use the service and share with them this excellent gift for the New Year.

I’d like to wish you all a Happy and Prosperous New Year! This definitely won’t be the last time you hear from me.

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com

Comments (1)

May 5, 2009

Striving to Provide a Better SocialToo – New Rates Take Effect May 11

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: analytics, facebook, prioritized, rate change, reliability, stats, stats e-mail, twitter — Jesse Stay @ 12:52 pm

It has always been my goal to keep SocialToo’s free features free, and paid features paid. I want to make things as easy as possible for you to clean up your stream and learn about your followers with as few hurdles as possible. At the same time, in some way we need to keep the SocialToo service running so we can provide you with the best and most reliable service possible. It’s really hard to do this with a 100% free service.

Last week we announced soon we would be implementing a new, one-time rate plan for our nightly stat e-mails that would enable us to provide those that pay a much more accurate stats experience and higher rate of reliability for both our nightly stats e-mails and auto-follow and unfollow functionality. You may notice when you log into your account now a new overlay shows up telling you about this, giving you the opportunity to pay for the new prioritized service.

As of today you can now pay a 1-time $20 fee which, when it goes into effect Monday, May 11, will put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account, meaning a much more accurate and reliable service for you. Previous to this, we were only able to guarantee at least once per 24 hours, and as we grew, that time frame would get even larger. With support from our users, we will now be able to expand much further and provide a much more reliable service to you.

To pay for the service, simply log into your account and a popup overlay will show up with a Paypal button you can click on to pay for the service. It’s one-time, and you’ll never pay again for the e-mails. On Monday, May 11, 2009, we’ll turn off the e-mail service for all non-paying accounts (auto-follow and unfollow will still continue) and move all payed accounts over to a dedicated server (or more depending on the number of users we have to process) responsible for prioritizing just these accounts. Those that pay now will be transferred over automatically with no interruption in service. You’ll want to do this soon so you don’t miss out on any e-mails – we cannot re-send past e-mails if you do not pay for the service.

In addition, any new users, starting today can purchase the service immediately, and on Monday will also be included in the prioritized group of users. Those new users will start getting e-mails immediately and will experience no interruption in service when the change goes into effect on Monday.

As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided. We’ll also seek to improve the free and paid versions of these services as we move forward, including more options to stop auto-DM and spam on social networks you belong to.

I hope you can respect our decision to start charging for this specific service as we grow and strive to provide you with the best service possible. It’s a decision that I think in the end will benefit those that choose to partake of it and will enable us to make it even better in the future. I pledge to continue providing you the best service and best tools possible to help you analyze and track your follower base on the Social Networks you belong to. As always, you may contact me personally via our contact@socialtoo.com address with any questions. Consider us your Companion to the Social Web.

Comments (15)

April 24, 2009

Status on Daily E-mails, New Rate Coming Soon

Filed under: Announcements,Status — Tags: followers, friends, stats — 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

Comments (4)

March 18, 2009

Stat E-mails Delayed

Filed under: Status — Tags: email, report, stats, Status, twitter — 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.

Comments (7)

March 17, 2009

Improving the Nightly Stat E-mails

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: email, reports, stats, twitter — Jesse Stay @ 6:46 am

In working to optimize the way our nightly stats e-mails get sent to our users, we’ve decided to add a few more things into the process. Starting today, you should start to receive a nicer-looking stats e-mail with more stats about yourself, and those that follow or stop following you.

In the e-mail, you’ll see your number of friends, followers, new followers, and new unfollowers. For each of those new followers and unfollowers, we’re now organizing them by last Tweet (which is an approximation, and will get more accurate over time). In addition, for each individual, you can mouse-over, see their number of followers, friends, location, number of Tweets. Click on the image, and it takes you to the user’s profile.

At first, some of the details will be only partially complete until we can get a complete cache of each user. This data will get more complete over time, and the experience will only improve. In addition, with the way we’re improving the e-mails, you should begin to receive them much earlier in the day (North America time).

We’re still finishing up the final touches on these new e-mails, but later today you should receive your first version. Your first version will contain only your name, number of followers, and friends. Then, tomorrow morning, first thing, you’ll receive your first e-mail, in the new format, with all your new followers and unfollows that happened today.

So sit back, relax, and soon you’ll be seeing a much richer e-mail experience! (Oh, and we’re not finished yet with the stats you’re getting – expect much more to come!)

Comments (6)

January 28, 2009

Inaccuracies in Stats E-mail Tonight

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: last tweet, nightly email, stats, twitter — Jesse Stay @ 12:38 am

Just as forewarning, there will be some missing followers and unfollowers in your stats e-mail tonight due to some limits we hit with our database today. The database problems have been resolved.

As we grow, we expect growing pains such as this to happen, and we’re working to implement measures to prepare for such growing pains, so we hope them to become much less frequent. Starting tomorrow, your stats should be back to normal. Please note that, as we mentioned earlier your “last tweets” will be slightly inaccurate until Twitter updates their API to allow us to update more frequently. We expect that to happen in the next week. We appreciate your patience!

Stay tuned – we have some exciting new features coming your way shortly!

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