SocialToo Tries To Weed Out the Auto DMer’s On Twitter

You know how annoying it is when you get twitter spam or when you follow someone and they IMMEDIANTLY auto DM you? Well SocialToo is fixing that for you…

Via email:

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We’ve talked 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, halting another popular method amongst Twitter spammers and people you just plain don’t want to auto-follow.

Recently we took that a little further. 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. I like to add all people whose updates I don’t want to miss to that list. When you add them, we automatically follow them for you if you aren’t doing so already.

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. And just in case it gets abused, we do include the whitelist into the scoring algorithm – the more people that add those individuals to their whitelist, the less chance of them being marked by our users as spammers or auto-dmers. It puts you in full control. Consider this the “social pager ank”.

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 who stop following you. 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 if you think it is too high or too low for your satisfaction), 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!

Nightly Stats E-mails and Prioritized auto-follow

If you haven’t considered it yet, please consider purchasing our upgrade to receive much more frequent and prioritized auto-follow. With this plan, you get a nightly e-mail that shows who followed you and stopped following you during the previous day, and what your last Tweet was at the time, giving you an approximate and possible reason for their unfollow. In addition, we display stats about each user that follows you and stops following you, and give you the ability to stop following or follow straight from the e-mail. Those users that have purchased this plan have been quite happy with it over the last month or two that we have offered it, and we put each user on this plan on a dedicated server so we can ensure you get the highest quality service.

You can purchase the prioritized upgrade for a one-time $20 fee (never again will you pay for the e-mail or prioritized auto-follow, although we may introduce other premium features outside this plan down the road). Just click on this Paypal link to start the purchase process. It’s a nice, cheap way to get some very valuable data about your Twitter account!

As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me via our support address atcontact@socialtoo.com if you have any questions.

Sincerely,

Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com