The SocialToo Blog

January 14, 2010

Per Twitter’s Request, We’re Removing Auto Unfollow

Filed under: Announcements — Tags: , , , — Jesse Stay @ 7:32 pm

We recognize auto unfollow has been an invaluable tool for many of you.  I added it because when I auto-follow, some times later on those people unfollow you again.  Twitter itself has a ratio limit which if you’re following over about 10% of those that are following you back, it will not let you follow anyone else.  So you’re stuck waiting to be able to follow back the people that have made the kind gesture to follow you.  To me it was a relationship building tool.

Twitter it seems thinks otherwise.  Per their request, we have been asked to remove our automatic unfollow service by the end of the month or risk having our service disabled.  They claim that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts”.  We want to respect Twitter’s request, as ultimately we are in their environment and subject to their own rules.  So long as we are using their API we have to play by their rules, and I respect that.

We will continue to be able to provide the same anti-spam and anti-phishing services we have been offering, which means you will still be able to automatically unfollow those that send you spam DMs, content with spam in it, and keywords and phrases you find objectionable should you choose to do so.  Our “unfollow all” service will also still remain.  This service enables users to unfollow everyone they’ve ever followed before.

Starting today, we are removing the ability to enable this service from your admin preferences so as no new users can enable the service.  In addition, we have removed the ability to purchase the unfollow catch up option.  Starting February 1, 2010, we are disabling this service forever and you will no longer be able to automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter if you were doing so before.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause – we are as disappointed as you are.  We are still firmly set on our original goals of automating your streams while enabling you to clean them up at the same time and focus on real relationships.  All of our other services are still available and remain to be some of our most popular tools that we offer.  In the meantime, if you do have issues with this, we encourage you to contact Twitter support and let them know of your use-cases for the service.  From my experience Twitter does listen so long as you keep it constructive.

In the meantime, stay tuned – we have some exciting new announcements on the way between now and February!

January 21, 2009

The Game Must Go On

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

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

What this means for you

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

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

The short plan

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

The long plan

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

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

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

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

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