Both the DM email service and the keyword-based spam-blocking feature look like excellent ideas. In addition to blocking spammers to your account, SocialToo will also alert Twitter's @spam account whenever you block somebody and flag them as a spammer (TweetDeck, we should note, offers a similar feature).

Fighting Twitter Spam

SocialToo, of course, was responsible for quite a few of these spam messages in the early days of Twitter; though this February, SocialToo's CEO Jesse Stay announced that the service would end support for auto DMs, and SocialToo had been already offering some basic tools to fight auto-following spammers. Others have now jumped into this market, and the problem is getting more pronounced by the day. Of course, the problem of Twitter spam in general is getting worse, too, and we are still waiting for a good third-party solution to filter spam messages in our regular Twitter stream or for Twitter to put its foot down and implement better spam filters itself.

In light of Facebook's recently announced vanity URL availability, founder Jesse Stay writes, "We're extending our existing Facebook profile redirect URLs, which redirect yourusername.socialtoo.com to your Facebook profile, and adding an additional layer of analytics to the whole process. So tonight, you'll be able to get a Facebook vanity URL and get the SEO benefits, but the URL you'll want to hand out to all your friends will be your SocialToo vanity URL because we'll provide statistics around those clicking on the URL, the browsers they're using, where they're located, and where they're clicking from." And yes, there's an app for that.

Here are some examples of the types of data users will be able to see:

To get the analytics-powered profile, all a user needs to do is register an account, click on the link to get a special code from Facebook, provide the code (along with a SocialToo username and password), and submit that information. No Twitter username is necessary, although providing Twitter information will give users additional features for Twitter. When the user logs in, he will see the new "SocialStats" tab with statistics for their URL.

This comes in the wake of a "no guarantees" policy toward accuracy or speed for Twitter users with more than 2,000 followers and general claims of delays, issues, and inaccuracies. Do we smell inadequate infrastructure?

To mitigate the costs of scaling, users are now being begged to purchase their once-free daily emails containing stats on their new Twitter followers and friends and the tweets that may have led to new followers or losing followers. SocialToo is charging a one-time $20 fee that will reportedly "put you on a dedicated server (or servers as we get more people paying for the service) that will enable us to run your account much more frequently and also auto-follow and re-cache much more frequently for your account."

Sure, it might seem like the humane and reasonable thing to do for SocialToo users; after all, we've all got twenty bucks, right?

But over at CenterNetworks, Allen Stern reminds us of the old "if you teach a man to fish" adage when he says, "My only concern with the $20 one-time fee is that he has lost nearly all chance to get more revenue from his power users. I assume many of the SocialToo power users will pay the $20 which will provide a quick stream of cash. I'd rather see him set the upgrade as a yearly fee. This way in a year Jesse can bring in new features and grab another set of funds. At this point his only chance to gain more revenue from those newly-paying users would be to offer more services and hope that they will upgrade again."

Today's email/blog post continued, "As always, our auto-follow and unfollow services will always remain free from the time you join SocialToo forward. In addition, you will always be able to create SocialSurveys and share them with your friends for free as we have always provided."

Users are also charged negligible to moderate amounts for other SocialToo services in the usual freemium fashion.

In the past, Stay has made much of Twitter's limiting API calls to 20,000 per hour and their "pulling the rug out from under its developers" by only allowing users to follow maximum of 1,000 people per day. After having leveled such heavy criticisms in the past, stating that Twitter was holding back business growth, it is interesting that his real growth challenge should come in the form of inadequate resources for scaling the service.

Apparently, SocialToo CEO Jesse Stay feels the same way. Last month SocialToo users were given the option to turn off auto DMs from other SocialToo users; today, Stay announced SocialToo is completely disabling auto-DMs.

While SocialToo was not the only service that provided auto DM support, it was one of the two main providers of this functionality. TweetLater still offers auto DM if you must have it, but if you too are sick of them and want to disable auto DMs, take a look at Jack Bastide's post on opting out of TweetLater.

Many of us have been inundated with auto DMs and so a huge thank you to Jesse Stay for leading the fight against auto DM spam. If you want to join us, why not send him your thanks via Twitter.

Update:

Also of interest (thanks Louis Gray) is that SocialToo is working on a filter of sorts for other auto DM services.

"If you provide your Twitter username and password (this is required because other services require it - it will be via OAuth in the near future) and check the box, "Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other services?", we'll set you up to block DMs from as many services that do this as we can, automatically."

Twitter watchers know that a large part of the service's use comes through its Application Programming Interface (API) and that's been a big part of what helped the young service grow. Now that the company has Britney Spears, CNN and Barack Obama among its ranks of users, though, developers seeking to push the limits of that API may soon find themselves no longer welcome.

No More "I Dislike You Too" Lists

What does that mean? For now it means that a handful of services that notify users who has unfollowed them will be effectively non-viable. That's far from our only concern about the issue, however.

Readers may remember a service called Qwitter, which emailed you every time someone unfollowed you on Twitter and told you what your last message posted was before that happened. On October 25th, a 15 year old UK blogger named "Joel D." stopped following me after I tweeted about being tired in ceramics class, for example. I don't hold a grudge but if you've got something against ceramics, Joel, then I say good riddance to you!

Seriously, though, a veil of paranoia and petty bitterness lifted from all of Twitter-dom just before Christmas when Qwitter finally gave up the ghost due to scalability issues on its end. (Apparently some people are still getting messages.) Update: Qwitter's founder dropped by to tell us that the service is now back up. So head on over, masochists of Twitter.

Now a service called SocialToo has raised the alarm about the forthcoming limit and says that a similar feature it offers will disappear as well.

What The Developers Say

SocialToo complains that Twitter should let it pay for heavy access to the API if it won't allow it for free, but Twitter apparently isn't interested. Third party developers also say that if the API was made more efficient, they could get the information they needed with less wear and tear on Twitter.

These developers who are unhappy with the new policy complain that it will unfairly limit their companies' growth, that it pulls the rug out from under supporters of the Twitter ecosystem and that it raises the possibility of Twitter reproducing the services they've worked hard to develop.

We're less concerned about unfollowing notifications in particular than we are with the ability for developers to push the limits of accessing this incredible store of data to create unforeseen and otherwise impossible innovations.

What does Twitter have to say about this? We asked them.

What Twitter Says

We pinged Twitter headquarters for a comment and this is what Alex Payne, API Lead at Twitter, had to say.

We picked the 20,000 requests per hour number precisely because it effects the fewest applications (less than ten of the hosts we see in our hourly report of high-traffic consumers of our site). In most cases, these larger Twitter applications make requests from multiple IPs. Since each of their IPs gets its own 20k/hour allotment of
requests, the developers behind these big Twitter API projects shouldn't have to lift a finger.

We're constantly upgrading our API technologies and educating developers about offerings we already have that they may not know about, including the Search API, Data Mining Feed, and the upcoming "firehose" of all public tweets. We prioritize this work based on what's going to have the most benefit for the broadest reach of applications.

The fact that 100% Twitter-powered companies like StockTwits are getting funding and expanding in popularity suggests that the Twitter API is meeting the needs of successful, growing businesses today.

At first we bought that explanation, but the more we thought about it the more doubt crept into our minds. That statement reads like a PR agent had a heavy hand in writing it.

Is Payne really saying that big companies will be fine, data that the company selectively exposes (tweets vs. profile data) will remain available and it's only a handful of developers that will be impacted? What if in that handful of developers there are people who are working on building a game changing service that we as users will be really excited about? We love Twitter but our loyalties lie with the developer community that builds on top of its service first.

Maybe we're wrong, though, and Payne's response is reasonable. Maybe the handful of developers who want to ping Twitter to death are just loser freaks with too much time on their hands, not enough business development skills and nowhere near the style of Twitter's new friends in Hollywood and on Madison Avenue! Really, though, maybe Twitter isn't putting future innovation at risk in order to take the easy way out on scalability challenges. What do you think?

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