The SocialToo Blog

August 30, 2010

Now You Can Check in on Twitter Through Facebook Places

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 12:02 pm

Recently Facebook launched the ability for users to checkin to any place with their mobile phone, sharing with their Facebook friends where they are and what they’re doing, but what about their Twitter friends?  Services like FourSquare and Gowalla offer the ability for users to share their checkins to Twitter as well as Facebook (or just leave them on Gowalla or Foursquare).  Facebook, with the exception of Pages, has seemed reluctant to include Twitter syncing for Facebook status updates.  That is where SocialToo comes in.  Starting today, you can now sync your Facebook checkins automatically from Facebook to Twitter using SocialToo.

The feature is completely free for anyone on Twitter and Facebook. To enable the feature, just log in to SocialToo through your Twitter account, click “Settings”, and click “Associate a Facebook Account”. Once you have both a Twitter and Facebook account linked in SocialToo, go back to the “Inbox” tab, and check the box next to “Facebook to Twitter” in the upper-right. You can now check the boxes next to the things you want to share, including, “Autopost Places” to automatically post checkins from Facebook. Once checked, any new checkin you post on Facebook will now go to Twitter.

In addition to checkins, you can also automatically post links and status updates. Any checkin with a note attached will show the note as the text of the Tweet and a link back to the checkin on Facebook. To exclude the checkin from Twitter, just add a “-” after a space at the end of your note and it won’t go to Twitter. The same goes for status updates and links that you post to Facebook.  We are also considering the potential for an opt-in “+” in the future (let us know in the comments if this is interesting to you).

Hopefully some of you find this feature useful.  We think it’s a powerful way to let others know, now on both Twitter and Facebook, where you are and what you’re doing, and has the potential to generate some interesting conversation.  Let us know how you plan to use it!

More about SocialToo:

SocialToo provides features to complement the experience people, businesses, and brands, have on the social networks they participate on. We’re a utility providing tools to help automate the process of managing a brand image, while at the same time enabling users to clean up spammy messaging, track followers and friends, and manage those friends and followers in the process. Here are some of the features we provide:

  • Auto Follow – follow back the people that follow you or your brand, providing potential discovery and networking opportunities, opening up communication channels, and giving those that follow you a sense of belonging in your community
    • Auto Follow is a one-time $10 fee.
  • Automatic DM and Stream filtering – do you get spammy DMs on Twitter? We’ll delete them automatically for you. Set up simple filters with keywords in DMs you don’t want to receive, then set rules, such as “unfollow”, “delete”, or “ignore” to get rid of them. Turn off Twitter’s DM e-mails and turn on ours, and we’ll also respect your rules with the DM e-mails we send, meaning if you say “ignore”, we won’t send you the DMs that match your rules. In addition, you can filter out people that say certain things in your stream, or that Tweet from specific (and some times spammy) applications.
    • DM filtering is free up to 4 filters. Stream and Application filtering comes with the monthly SocialToo Premium plan. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • Bulk Unfollow – need to start over on Twitter? Unfollow all the people you’ve ever followed at once. Set a whitelist under “Friends” and you can exclude specific people as you do so.
    • Bulk Unfollow on Twitter is a one-time $35 fee.
  • SocialToo Stats – one of our most popular features, you get a daily e-mail with all the people that followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter. We try to organize them by the Tweets we detected at the time of the unfollow or follow. We also provide additional information about each person and the ability to unfollow or follow them straight from the e-mail. In addition, for our monthly Premium users we provide an organized interface, showing a timeline of all your new follows and unfollows in a graph, your number of Tweets, and if you click through to any day it will show you the new followers and unfollowers for that day at any point we’ve tracked, along with your Tweets for that day.
    • The daily stats e-mail is a one-time $20 fee. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
  • SocialToo Surveys – a “Social” way of posting quick polls to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Create a quick poll, and share it with your friends on multiple networks. Your friends can take the poll, share it with their friends, comment on it, or create their own!
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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.

September 23, 2009

SocialToo Launches Anti-Virus Solution for Twitter

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 6:31 pm

VirusViruses and worms are rampant on the web.  Until only recently this has been a big problem on your PC.  Surely, you wouldn’t think of running your computer without an anti-virus solution, but what about the viruses and worms spreading throughout the social networks you belong to? While they may not directly affect your computer, they can cause just as much damage, including: identity theft, stealing of your private and financial information, takeover of your accounts, and embarrassing situations!

Just today, in fact, a worm is propagating through Twitter direct messages (DMs) trying to trick unsuspecting members into thinking it’s a legitimate message from a friend. Today, we have a solution for that at SocialToo, and we are launching automatic anti-virus solutions for Twitter and other social networks.

Starting now, as part of a new premium service we’re offering, anyone who goes to SocialToo and checks the “Send SocialToo DM e-mails” box will no longer receive malicious DMs we detect as rampant on Twitter, as we will be stopping them at their source.  We’re taking a proactive approach to this now, and all our users will not receive those DMs we’ve confirmed are malicious.  For instance, the “hey. i make $300-500 a day online. this website showed me how” DMs that have been flooding the network over the last few days will automatically be deleted from your Twitter DM box and reported to Twitter’s @spam account on your behalf.  Also, the “rofl, this you on here?” DMs will never show up.

As your companion for the Social Web, one of our main roles is to protect you from getting conned or tricked into clicking on a malicious link and having your account compromised as well.

Here’s what you need to do for it to be most effective:

  • Click “Sign in With Twitter” on SocialToo.com.  Click on the Preferences tab and check the box “Send SocialToo DM e-mails”. Be sure your e-mail address is entered and click “Submit” at the bottom.  It’s now enabled for your account!
  • Go to the “Settings” link in the upper-right hand corner of Twitter.  Click on the “Notices” tab, and uncheck the “Direct Text E-mails” option.  You don’t need this any more because we’ll replace that e-mail with more useful DM e-mails.
  • Go to your Devices tab and turn off device notifications – again, the SocialToo e-mails will replace this – and we’re also working on some better mobile solutions to replace this functionality.

Once you have done all of the above, SocialToo will now be responsible for notifying you of new DMs.  We will not forward those that have known spam or worms or viruses in them, and  you will only get the good DMs.

This new automatic virus detection is free until November 1st for all SocialToo users. We are still working out the details on the new plan, and we will notify each user that has signed up so you can make the choice at that point if you want to continue with the service.  This includes our existing auto-dm and spam service subscribers – again, it’s 100% free until November 1st.

We will need input from our users as you see malicious DMs. Please be sure to add them to your spam keywords as you see them, and we’ll be tracking trends through those keywords.  Also, if you feel it’s of particular importance please let us know by DMing @socialtoo on Twitter or e-mailing us at contact@socialtoo.com.  We’re hoping to make this smarter and smarter as we move forward, and you can expect to see much more from us in the future.

Lastly, if you’re a developer and would like access to any of this information, we do have an API. Contact us to find details. I’d love to work with you to integrate this same spam and virus protection into your own Twitter clients.

It’s time we put an end to worms and viruses on Twitter. You wouldn’t want to be on a PC without anti-virus protection. Why would you be on Twitter without SocialToo?

Consider SocialToo your vaccine for the Social Web.

September 15, 2009

Tag Your Twitter Friends From Facebook With SocialToo Status

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:55 am

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.49 AM

Yesterday Facebook launched their new tagging feature worldwide to their users.  The feature is simple – to tag one of your Facebook friends, you just start typing their name, prefixed by “@”, and their name appears in a drop-down that you can select.  Their name will then be linked to their Facebook profile in their status update on Facebook, and an e-mail sent to that individual to notify them they were tagged.  This also works with the Pages you are a fan of, and applications you use.  As you know though, SocialToo Status has provided friend tagging for several weeks before Facebook announced this new feature.

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Today I’m happy to announce that we’re enhancing our tagging even further.  Now, no longer do you have to type your friends’ names in the box (in fact, we’ve removed the box).  Now you just have to select the SocialToo Status green quote icon, enter your status update as you normally would, prefixing any names you want to tag with “@”, just like you would with a normal status update, and when you hit submit, those names will automatically appear next to your status update as tagged, just like they used to, but much less effort necessary on your part!

There’s more though.  Now, when you tag your friends on Facebook and enable SocialToo Status, if you check the “Twitter” box, we’ll automatically search SocialToo’s large database of Facebook users with Twitter accounts. If the users you have tagged have already registered their Twitter account with SocialToo and associated that with a Facebook account we will automatically replace the tagged name with their Twitter handle, in @reply fashion to get their attention on Twitter as well!  If the user is not yet in our database we will just put their Facebook name in its place.

Screen shot 2009-09-15 at 3.50.03 AM

If you ever had a reason to convince your Twitter friends to try SocialToo Status now’s the time!  Be sure to check out our #socialchange contest and you, or they can have the chance to win free status e-mails for life!  We’re continuing to change the Social web landscape with SocialToo – keep sending us your ideas!

You can learn how to enable SocialToo Status on your Facebook account via our earlier blog post.

September 14, 2009

Make Social Change With SocialToo – Enter Our Contest!

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 4:40 am

socialchangeThe last few weeks at SocialToo have been especially busy as we roll out new features, and I would like to keep that trend going. Today we’re going to start something new, and based on your feedback, at the end of this week, I’ll be giving out 10 free stats e-mail and priority service upgrades (each a $20 value, making $200 of giveaways!).

Here’s what you need to do to participate:

We want to know what you like about SocialToo, but we also want to know your ideas for how we can get even better! So starting today (as of this e-mail), we want you to share what you like, along with an idea of something you think might change the web. It can be anything really, but you have to assume SocialToo can solve it. To win, you’ll need to Tweet, or share via SocialToo Status (this can be to Facebook or Twitter) something you like about SocialToo, and an idea you have that will change the web. Your post must include “socialtoo” somewhere in the post, along with the hashtag, “#socialchange”. Here are some examples:

“@socialtoo I love your SocialToo Status! I think SocialToo should help eliminate Twitter spam. #socialchange”

or

“I love my SocialToo Stats Emails! I really would like this to work with LinkedIn too! #socialchange”

At midnight this upcoming Sunday (that would be 12am MDT on September 20, 2009) I am going to randomly pick 10 posts that meet that criteria and give those users free e-mail stats and priority following for life! You get to help change the web, and enter to win SocialToo services that change the web at the same time. I think that’s a fair deal!

Want to learn more about our stats e-mails?  For $20 for life, you can get a daily statistics e-mail that shares who followed you and stopped following you on Twitter the previous day.  We also tell you lots of useful stuff about each follower, such as how many followers and friends they have, their location, number of status updates, and more.  We’ll even approximate which Tweet you posted around the time they started or stopped following you.  In addition, we add you to a prioritized server that runs your auto follow and unfollow much faster than our other users.  It’s a lot of value for just a one-time fee!

If you want to try it out just sign into SocialToo, and you can purchase any of our premium services under your Preferences tab.  Of course, if you end up winning our contest I am always happy to give your winning entry to a friend!

Let’s work together and make Social Change – let me know what amazing things you think SocialToo can do to change the world through our contest this week!

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

August 24, 2009

SocialToo Status – Your Central Hub for Posting to Facebook and Twitter

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , , , , — Jesse Stay @ 10:00 am

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Facebook has long been one of the best places to connect with family and friends and update what you are doing. Now, new tools and communities have grown, such as Twitter, and you may want to update your friends on those networks as well. It has become simply too difficult to manage all this from Facebook, that is until now.  Today we’re announcing SocialToo Status.

SocialToo Status makes Facebook your central hub for posting updates to the networks you belong to. Via a simple app you install on your Facebook profile and home page, you can now use your existing status update box (or “Publisher”) in Facebook to share your updates to Twitter, any Facebook Fan Page you manage, and even your own personal wall – on a post-by-post basis.  This new tool enables you to control who sees your updates, when you want, for every single status update you publish to Facebook.

When you publish via SocialToo Status, your updates appear in your personal stream, along with a link to each destination we also sent the status update to.  This helps promote your other Facebook Pages and Twitter account, and gives others a sense of whom else you are speaking to.  The little green SocialToo quote icon with each post also helps your status updates stand out – we do no promotion of SocialToo in your updates so it looks just like a normal status update.  Our goal is to do all we can to help promote discussion for each post you publish, and at the same time give you the control in a single interface to tell where those updates end up.  We think that’s pretty powerful!

Here’s how you get started – it’s actually quite simple:

  1. Go to http://socialtoo.com and click on the “Facebook App” link in the upper-right corner – you’ll want to hit “allow” on the prompts it asks you so we can properly publish status updates to your stream.
  2. Once the app is added to your account, you’ll notice on both your home page and profile page (you can update from either location) a new green SocialToo Status quote icon in the “attachments” section.  You’ll probably have to hit the down “more” arrow to get to it. The more you use it, the more likely it will appear outside that drop down in the future!
  3. Click on the green quote icon, and a new SocialToo Status-branded Publisher will appear.  Congrats – you’re all set up!

If you have not yet associated your Twitter account, a “sign in with Twitter”  button will show up in the new SocialToo Status Publisher.  You’ll want to click on that and associate the Twitter account to publish to from Facebook.  It will only go to this account when you check the box (you’ll see this in a bit).  Also, if you want to publish to the Facebook Pages you administer, just go to the link in the new publisher box that it prompts you with, and approve each Page you want to publish to.

Now, every time you send an update to Facebook, click on the little SocialToo Status green chat icon, select Twitter and/or the Facebook Pages you want it to go to (or none of them), and it will go to each one you select.  The power of Facebook Status updates are in your hands now with SocialToo Status.  Let us know what you think!

You can see the full howto with screenshots at http://apps.facebook.com/socialtoo/status.  This is only the beginning!

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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.

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