SocialToo Extends Battle Against Twitter DM Spam With New Feature

SocialToo, a social Web utility aimed at enhancing your experience on Twitter, Facebook and other sites, is well known for its autofollowing capabilities. But with the rise of marketing and spam on some sites, Twitter especially, the noise has gotten out of control for some people - as you have seen a small number unfollow all their connections, in effect rebooting their accounts, and others complain mightily about the noise that has arisen from junk direct messages. With a new feature introduced today, SocialToo has made it very easy to stop those broadcasting junk into your stream with one click.

The new feature extends Twitter's capability of bringing direct messages to your e-mail, and adds options below to let you report the sender as spam, block them, or report them as sending automated direct messages. And unlike competitors, including Topify, it can be done without having to send this specific message to one of their dedicated e-mail addresses.

As an advisor to SocialToo, I often get access to some of the features early, and this enhancement has already paid dividends. Now, instead of just manually deleting the DM, I can click and send the person's annoyance away forever.



One DM via SocialToo I Was Ready to Zap

More than just this utility, SocialToo lets you set up a blacklist of keywords from within the site that you may never want to see in DMs, ever. That means you never have to see updates from Mafia Wars or Spymaster or whatever your least favorite junk spam of the week is. That can be found in your SocialToo account's preference tab here: http://socialtoo.com/twitter

If there is a way to communicate with people, spammers will do their part to find an exploit. SocialToo is trying to be part of the solution and helping to clean up your social networking experience.

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Disclosure: I am an advisor to SocialToo

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Topify Stays Ahead of Twitter by Tweaking Notification Alerts

Last week, whether it was big news or not, depending who you ask, Twitter finally got around to improving the notifications it sends users when they gain new followers. Rather than a basic text note linking to the person's profile, the update displayed HTML content and included background on the individual, including their follower and following counts as well as updates. It was largely seen as being in response to third party services that have been doing similar functions for months, including Topify, which I use and discussed in March.


Topify's older notifications have simplified subject lines.

The new Topify updates contain follower statistics.
Topify, who seemed pleased that Twitter is starting to follow their functionality, stealthily added a tweak to their own notifications today, changing the subject line to show not just the user's name, but also their Twitter handle and followers/following counts. For those people who might be getting a ton of notifications, or who don't want to click through each e-mail to get the pertinent data, this might be a time saver. Alternatively, it could be a simple update for update's sake. Either way, it still keeps Topify ahead of Twitter's native offering.

Also keeping Topify ahead of Twitter's standard (though improved) e-mails is that you can perform actions directly from the message. You can hit reply to automatically follow back, or on direct message alerts, you can hit reply to send the user a DM yourself. You can even forward the message to block@topify.com if you just want the user to disappear. In contrast, Twitter instead only offers the ability to click through to a profile.

The ecosystem being built around Twitter is an interesting one, and each little tweak helps.

Twitter Launches Enhanced New Follower E-mails

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Facebook/FriendFeed)

It would appear that Twitter has launched a brand new format for their new follower notification E-mails they send out to users opting to be alerted to new followers. The e-mails are now in a prettier HTML format and include the new follower's name, Twitter username, and picture. They also include the number of updates, number of people they follow, and number of followers they have. While users aren't given the option to follow straight from the e-mail, you can block the user by clicking on a link in the e-mail.

It would appear as though Twitter is now competing head-to-head to the recently sold business, Twimailer and another popular e-mail service, Topify.  Both services provide similar data, and, in addition, show recent Tweets and other related data to the user to help in deciding whether one should follow or not.  These service also do the same with DMs a user receives through Twitter.  It will be interesting to see if Twitter decides to venture further into this area or if these other services will still be able to thrive.

The New Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications

With the current lack of API for new follows on Twitter (besides these e-mails), it will remain hard for any service to scale to mass proportions for free and afford to add new servers to meet Twitter's API limit demands and simple load for communicating with the API.  This will become even harder as advertisers cut back more and more on spending for these types of applications.

The Old Look for Twitter E-mail Notifications

It was for this same reason that (full disclosure), my own service, SocialToo recently launched a new prioritized e-mail service that you can receive bulk updates of your new followers, as well as unfollowers, along with information about each one. We just announced a new pricing model that you can purchase these daily e-mails for a one-time $20 fee.  Such a model was necessary to pay for a scalable architecture, and you can likely expect the same from many other Twitter apps in the near future.

As Twitter grows, with no known roadmap or business model, developers and businesses should use caution that their businesses can scale and adapt as Twitter, or Facebook, or any other social network or API they are building on top of has the threat to venture into their territory.  There is no word from Twitter yet on these new changes.

Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Three Twitter Tools That Enhance New Follower Notifications

By Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Twitter's growing pains may have started early, but a lot of "tweeples" that have been on Twitter for some time are starting to feel their own growing pains. As Twitter's presence and exposure to mainstream increases, new follower notification e-mails are beginning to drown our inbox.

Twitter has no native functionality to help simplify the process of deciding who to follow back. As of right now, a lot of Twitter users are following this process:

1. Receive new follower e-mail
2. Click link to follower's profile
3. Review profile on Twitter
4. Follow back / Ignore
5. Go back and delete e-mail

This is a five step process that is being simplified by three new Twitter Tools: Topify, Twimailer, and Twittfilter.

Topify

Earlier this month, Louis reviewed the Topify service. So, I won't spend too much time on this. In fact, just head to the review: Topify Enhances Twitter Following Notifications (50 Invites).

To sum up the purpose of Topify:

"The result is a more complete picture of the individual, from within your e-mail, without forcing you to go to the Twitter Web site to learn more."

Twimailer

Twimailer is the enhanced follower notification service I prefer to use. Twimailer follows the same concept as Topify, but presents the information in a different way visually. Each e-mail provides you with the following information:

• 10 latest tweets
• Follower/Following count
• Twitter bio
• Follow back, Block, & Spam options

Unlike Topify, Twimailer doesn't require an invite to the service in order to use it right now.

Twittfilter

Twittfilter puts a spin on enhanced follower notifications. The approach taken with this service is to filter new followers along with enhancing the notifications. The service allows you pre-define which follower notifications you'd like to receive. Using a star rating of 1-5, Twittfilter will only pass along notifications of new followers that fit into the star rating of your choice. How is this done?

"Twittfilter will look at your friend/follow list, theirs, recent activity on both sites, friend follow ratio (and a few other things) and give you a score from 0 to 5. This can be automated but only by request."

The same algorithm is applied to your new followers. The downside to this (and most recommendation tools) is the possibility of missing out new followers that may have been of interest. Nothing's perfect, but Twittfilter does a decent job of picking accurate matches.

Better Manage Follower Overload

Now you have 3 of the best tools for managing new follower notifications. Each tools is great and gets the job done. The only real difference is the way the information is displayed within the e-mail sent by each service. After signing up for any of these tools your new follower process should be reduced from jumping back and forth between Twitter and your inbox to this:

• Receive new follower notification
• Read & Decide
• Delete e-mail

For those that are already using these tools, tell us your experience with them in the comments section.

Read more by Corvida Raven at SheGeeks.net.

Topify Enhances Twitter Following Notifications (50 Invites)

Last week, we talked about one of the latest annoyances on Twitter being refollow spam - the act of a user leveraging a script to regularly follow you repeatedly, on a schedule. Since that post, Twitter has seemed to crack down on users of the practice, suspending those accounts. Now that it's safe to look at following notifications again, I checked in to a new service called Topify, which doesn't just send the text notifications that are Twitter's standard, but instead, detailed reports that show a user's avatar, their twitter statistics, and most recent tweets. The result is a more complete picture of the individual, from within your e-mail, without forcing you to go to the Twitter Web site to learn more.

As you can see in the below example, when a new user follows your account, you are notified as to whether you are already following them, their followers and following data, bio link, and recent updates.


If you want to message the user, just reply to the follow e-mail. This, in theory, could enable you to set up Auto-DMs from your e-mail, should you set up a rule. (But I wouldn't encourage it)

Topify is in closed invite-only beta right now, and is the brainchild of Ouriel Ohayon and @arikfr. You can get access to Topify with the following link for louisgray.com readers: http://snurl.com/doige.

You can find out more about Topify on their blog.