Use Topify to Manage Your Twitter Life with Email
Beta service Topify hopes to make managing your Twitter contacts easier both by enhancing your new follower emails with additional information, and enabling email direct message replies. Similar to another service we reported on last week, Topify distinguishes itself by taking a multi-pronged approach to making email your new Twitter control center.
Topify is the brainchild of Ouriel Ohayon (@ourielohayon) and Arik Framovitch (@arikfr). They realized that for a lot of us, managing new Twitter notifications and direct messages can often be a hassle that the Twitter interface doesn't make any easier. Their solution is a service that hooks itself in to Twitter in two places, revamping new follow notifications, adding support for following back, and replying to direct messages directly from email.
The benefits are clear, but just like with other services hoping to ride Twitter's rise to fame, the lack of a Twitter authentication mechanism means that you must give Topify both your login name and password, and redirect your Twitter notification emails to the Topify service. This requires a lot of trust on your part. The good news is the site has a fairly broadly-worded privacy policy:
Privacy policy (of sorts): Rest assured we will never knowingly disclose, sell, give away or otherwise use any personal information collected during your use of this site (namely, the twitter usernames and passwords provided). Honest.
Finally, we would like to compare the 'enhanced' Twitter follow email between Topify and Twimailer. Topify in the last 24 hours has re-vamped their email to show the follower's information more clearly (see below), but there is one place where Twimailer still stands out - it lists the last 10 tweets from the follower, while Topify only shows one.
The scale, at least for us, still tips in Topify's favor though, for a few reasons. First, Topify adds more functionality than just an enhanced follow email. Second, although the privacy policy is still far from completely re-assuring, it's still better than Twimailer's. Third, we like that we can easily find Ouriel's Twitter and blog links, which we can't say for the somewhat mysterious creator(s) of Twimailer.
Last but not least, Ouriel has given ReadWriteWeb 50 free beta invites, so click on this link and get started!
Update:We were recently informed by Ouriel in the comments that the updated notification email now contains the last 5 tweets, along with knowing if you are already following the person, and a link to promote Topify. You can see a screenshot of it here. Thanks, Ouriel!
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How does this best using say, Twitter for Blackberry? Mine seems to work fine for these uses...so far.
When i see stuff like that, i wonder why twitter did not think about it in the first place. brilliant idea!
Just signed up to Topify and got my first "Topify Powered" new follower "enhanced" notice on my regular email. Brilliantly simple and very useful granular info. Will be a great time saver.
I for one was not concerned about handing over my login details for one reason and one reason ONLY: Ouriel Ohayon (@ourielohayon) has put his name and reputation on the line. Got people locally in Herzeliya Pituach and France who can find him if Topify messes around with my account! ;)
@ourielohayon you may want to build in a simple counter to show people how much time they are saving, in aggregate, by using the Topify "push info" service as opposed of having to leave email and go to twitter or another service to discover to follow someone or not.
Been on twitter for about 3 weeks. I have seen a moderate boost in traffic. Mostly traffic from people just browsing for more followers, but traffic none the less. Next step: learning how to build a stronger network and convert these additional eyeballs in to fans and sales. come check me out.
http://twitter.com/spryka
Phil, you asked for it here it is? now you can see more updates on Topify. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ouriel/3346599224/sizes/o/
We have a few more cool features, like the possibility to know if you are already following the user. Another opportunity to save you clicks and time
more coming soon
@Alexander: cool idea. we ll look into it
Thanks for the update Ouriel, I've added an update at the bottom to the post. Great work!
Phil, you asked, we listened :)
Posted by: ouriel
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March 11, 2009 1:23 PM
Is there a service that allows you to completely Twitter (update, get updates, etc) via your email? I would love if a service just sent me that last 200 Tweets every hour or so, and I could reply to them via email. Would be great for people behind blocked web access during the day.