Starting tonight, any Facebook Public Profile Page (that’s Page with a capital “P”) with over 100 subscribers has the opportunity to select its own vanity URL.  While it hasn’t had the hype from the blogosphere that we saw from the previous private Profile vanity URLs, it does seem to be having a large effect, as Facebook has slowed down tonight, even more than when the private Profile vanities were released.  Get yours now while you can - you can reserve yours for both your Public Pages and private Profiles via the http://facebook.com/username link.  Please comment below if you want some help reaching the 100 fan limit!

As with any and all of my social network profiles, please don’t hesitate to friend me!  My most active profiles are listed over on the upper-right of this blog, but if you Google “Jesse Stay” you can find just about everywhere I belong.  Tonight I was able to reserve short URLs for my most active Pages - please become a fan or friend me!:

My personal Facebook Profile: http://jessestay.socialtoo.com

My public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/socialdeveloper

SocialToo’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/socialtoo

I’m on Facebook–Now What??? (my first book)’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/fbbook

FBML Essential (my second book)’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/fbmlessentials

We’re Baptist’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/baptists

We’re Catholic’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/catholicsocial

Don’t forget to join SocialToo (my service) to get your own personalized vanity URL.  yourusername.socialtoo.com will redirect to your Facebook profile, and we’ll track statistics for everyone that clicks on your URL.  It’s the only URL you’ll ever need to hand out to others.  Oh, and see the above URLs? Expect a solution for those soon as well.  Sign up for yours at http://socialtoo.com.

As of today on my service SocialToo, we’re taking a stand and removing the ability to auto-dm your followers. This service, as it grew, was getting out of hand, very impersonable, and people were just ignoring them. It was a tough decision due to the number of users using the service, but I think making this decision is the right thing to do. In the end this makes the other services we provide, such as auto-follow, more productive. I’m trying to think of other less-spammy and more personal alternatives down the road, however.

To replace auto-DMs, we’re now blocking DMs from any service we’re able to that do provide the auto-DM service. In addition, I’ll be working on some new features in the near future to auto-unfollow users we detect auto-DM-like behavior from for you. Let’s end this robot-like practice once and for all. I’m taking the reigns on this one.

In addition to the Twitter Bowl results today, we also launched the ability to comment on SocialToo SocialSurveys over on the SocialToo blog today. Similar to the way TwitPic comments work, this means your followers can now comment on each of your SocialToo SocialSurveys right on the survey itself, and have their response go out to their Twitter followers as well, guaranteeing even more exposure for your SocialSurveys. This is just one of many updates we’ll be rolling out over the coming weeks. Try it out and let me know what you think!

Today Brian Solis announced the results of the promotion my company, SocialToo did with him, Jeremiah Owyang, Louis Gray, Chris Heuer, and Guy Kawasaki. The promotion was to encourage everyone to prepend their Tweets about the Superbowl ads with #superbowlads, and then vote for their favorite ad on a SocialToo SocialSurvey at the end of the Super Bowl. The results were interesting:

• There were a total of 1,534 Tweets during the Superbowl mentioning #superbowlads
• 563 people voted on the survey
• 3,151 visited the survey page (showing SocialToo SocialSurveys don’t just cover Twitter)
• 111 of those visits came from Facebook, 616 directly from Twitter
• The top ads were 1. Transformers, 2. Hulu, 3. Career Builder, 4. Pepsi Max, “I’m Good”, 5. Doritos, “Free Doritos”
• These stats are vastly different from other nation-wide polls, showing that the Social Media audience is its own niche, with different ideas and opinions

In addition, midway through the Superbowl we asked viewers to share their thoughts on the overall ad experience. The results were consistent with other findings, showing that most viewers only viewed the ads as par or less from past SuperBowls.

Thanks to Brian Solis for leading all this and putting it together and Jeremiah Owyang for the idea.  Brian put a lot of work into organizing all this - you can read more of his findings and results, along with a much more in-depth analysis over on his blog.

Some of you may have noticed from my Tweets and FriendFeed posts, but I just wanted to notify others here as well. SocialToo.com now has its own blog, and I’ll be doing more SocialToo-related posts there now. I still may re-share a few announcements here, but most SocialToo-related posts will now go over there. Be sure to subscribe to get all of our updates, news, and announcements!

I’m very proud and excited to announce that Louis Gray, my publisher and fellow-author at LouisGray.com, will now be part of my company, SocialToo.com’s, Board of Advisors and helping us to further build out our strategy in the near and long-term future. Louis comes from a strong PR and marketing background, and when not blogging, he works in corporate marketing and public relations for a private Silicon Valley technology infrastructure company, and is an advisor to ReadBurner, Inc. Louis is a UC Berkeley graduate, holding a degree in Political Science and Mass Communications. He’ll serve as a great help in building out strategy for SocialToo, which I believe is a tool for Marketers, to a mass audience.

Louis approached me with several great ideas which I hope we can implement soon, and which we’ll be working to integrate into the already rich set of tools which SocialToo provides. His transparency in what he does I think will serve well in keeping us a responsible participant in building tools that work to meet the needs of all users on social networks our users belong to. Louis himself has quite the following, and has introduced the likes of Robert Scoble and others to FriendFeed - I’m sure you’ll be seeing more from us on that service now with him on board, especially as we branch out to other services beyond Twitter.

Louis was first to recognize and report TweetDeck, the now extremely popular Twitter Client. He was first to cover Social Median, which recently sold for several million dollars under a year. He’s covered many other very successful services and clients, and he’s one that knows a successful company when he sees it. I’m very honored and excited to have him on board, and plan for much, much more thanks to his advice and involvement in SocialToo going forward. Welcome, Louis!

I’ve been talking about the “next new feature” of SocialToo for awhile now. Tonight, in a partnership with Guy Kawasaki of AllTop and Garage Technology Ventures, SocialToo.com announced the release of SocialSurveys, a viral way of polling your followers in a very easy manner. Here’s how it works:

• You go to Socialtoo.com and register if you have not done so already - you must provide your Twitter credentials to get the most out of it (other services will be added soon)
• Click “Create Survey” to get started
• Add your question and some answers
• Leave “Send a URL for this SocialSurvey to your Twitter friends” checked if you want to send out an update on Twitter. This posts an update automatically, with the question in the content, followed by the URL to your SocialSurvey to Twitter.
• It redirects to the survey - you can then use this URL to send to any other friends you want to see it.

In addition to SocialSurvey creation, you can also subscribe to the surveys your friends create via RSS. To do so, when you log into SocialToo, click on the RSS icon, or the link that says “Click to add (your name)’s surveys to your RSS Reader”. Add that to your RSS Feed Reader and you’ll now get every survey that user posts. It should also be noted that you can post your own surveys to FriendFeed through this method. With all this, SocialSurveys could be compared to “TwitPic, for Surveys”. You can see all my surveys here, and add them to your RSS reader via this link.

SocialSurveys top out an existing feature set that is yet to be beat amongst other individual tool providers. Existing features include:

• Automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter and Identi.ca, with no effort or e-mail rules to set up on your part.
• Specify users to “blacklist” and exclude from the auto-following
  Automatically unfollow those that unfollow you on Twitter - this improves your ratio of followers to following, improving your ranking on sites such as TwitterGrader.
• Send direct messages to your new followers on Twitter.
• Get daily e-mails with statistics surrounding who follows and unfollows you during the day, including your last Tweet when they followed or unfollowed you, similar to Qwitter.
• When you provide your Facebook credentials, YourUserName.socialtoo.com redirects to your Facebook profile, giving you a short, easy-to-remember URL to give your friends to point them to your Facebook profile. You can visit my Facebook profile via http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

With the launch of SocialSurveys, SocialToo is poised to be at the fore-front of providing all the tools you need to stay on top of the Social Networks you belong to. With current integration points into Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook, and plans to add many more in the future, SocialToo is set to be your one-stop shop to being “Your Companion to the Social Web”. Expect more tools and features very soon!

You can see screenshots, and an excellent write-up over at LouisGray.com.

I’ve been throwing hints on Twitter over the last week or two that I’ve been working on this, and with a little extra time I finally got it together. Today I’d like to announce that, as of this moment, we have some really cool new features for Twitter users on SocialToo.com, all in one place!

SocialToo, which is trying to be “Your Companion to the Social Web”, is seeking to build the tools and utilities that compliment your experience on the social networks you belong to. Up until now, anyone could sign up and automatically get the ability to have it follow all those on Twitter that follow you. The script ran once a day, and would do all the work for you, while also enabling you to blacklist users you don’t want it to follow. This enables you to automate, while making exceptions, making management of your friends on Twitter much easier. In addition, by providing Facebook credentials it would redirect “yourusername.socialtoo.com” to your Facebook profile.

Today, I’d like to announce some new features:

• First of all, for those with less than 2,000 followers (this is due to a Twitter limit), we’re now updating your followers up to the hour - as Twitter improves their API I’ll update this to work even more realtime. We’re working with Twitter on getting their API improved to handle this. If you have 2,000 followers or more instead of just once a day, we’re now updating every 6 hours, so even your followers will update faster than before.
• Today, we’re adding the ability to add a message that we’ll send to all your new followers via direct message. This can be a great opportunity to thank your followers, or, as a business account, tell them about a unique promotion you are running. However, if you’re just signing up and aren’t already following those who follow you, we recommend waiting until your account syncs up before turning this on, or all those we follow will get dm’d, even if they’re not new followers. This should only be applicable to new accounts - if you have an existing account, check your preferences and be sure to turn this feature on!
• In addition, if you have a bunch of people who followed you, you followed back, and then they stopped following you (this is the case for many Twitter spammers), we’ve added the ability to turn on a feature that unfollows those that are not following you back. I think it’s who you follow that matters, so my recommendation is to use this feature sparingly, and turn it off when your account is back in sync. You can use it however you want though.
• We’ve got a fresh new design! - okay, I admit, we’re not perfect yet, and were this the golden days I’d say we’re still technically in “beta” (I hate that excuse though), but we got a superstar designer to offer some help on the design for this - thanks so much to our designer!! You know who you are. The new design will come into play much more in the next round of features.
• My favorite feature: follower statistics. Not only are we now tracking those that follow you, but we’re also tracking those that stopped following you. You’ll now get an e-mail every night telling you the followers that stopped following you, and who your new followers are (and consequently who you followed). This is turned off for all existing users - go into your preferences to turn this on and find out details about those you’re following and those who may have unfollowed you (and we’ll soon provide other statistics to help you find out why).

As planned, I think we’re changing the game in making your social experience better all in one place with these tools. You may be familiar with other sites that do similar things out there, but you will quickly find that SocialToo.com is easier to set up, more automated, more accurate, and much less hassle than some of the other services out there.

Oh, and there’s one more really big thing. You’ll have to wait a few weeks to hear our next announcement though. Much more on the way!

You can sign up at http://socialtoo.com (that’s T-O-O, like “tool”, or “also”). Follow us on Twitter at @socialtoo for more updates!

If you log into your SocialToo.com account (or register if you haven’t already!) you can now click on the “Identi.ca” link at the top, provide your Identi.ca credentials, and you’ll now have the capability to automatically follow those that follow you on the microblogging site identi.ca. Not only that (I realize you can do that already on identi.ca through preferences), but if you do it through SocialToo.com you can also blacklist users from being followed again, something Identi.ca does not currently provide. Auto follow happens each night (and will happen more often when the API allows me to do so).

This is significant, in that now in addition to Facebook and Twitter, we’ll now have the capability to integrate Identi.ca into the tools we’re building and integrating with the Social Networks you belong to. Auto follow is just a start, but we are just days from launching a new feature that I think you’ll like, and it will automatically work on Twitter, Identi.ca, and Facebook if you’ve provided your credentials to do so.

SocialToo.com is your companion to the Social Web. My intention is to build tools that complement the Social Networks you already belong to, and make those networks even more powerful and useful through the tools we provide and integrate together across social networks. This is only one of many features we’ll be adding over the next few months.

Bear with me right now - the interface is still really simple. We’ll fix that up as we move forward. Be sure to provide your credentials if you’re on identi.ca already, let me know if you see any bugs, but give it a try!

You can find me on identi.ca here.

I have a sincere favor to ask of you. Would you, if you have not already, go to http://socialtoo.com and sign up and help me out in my cause? Share it with others, blog about it, Twitter it - this was written for you. Today, I launched something special on SocialToo.com, something that I hope will make a better environment on Twitter. It only works if lots of people use it though.

Today I launched an intelligent blacklisting feature on SocialToo.com. After registering and logging into your SocialToo! Dashboard, you’ll see a text box where you can enter twitter screen names you would like to blacklist. For each “spammer” you see, or individual you simply do not want to follow, enter their Twitter screen-name, and when a certain percentage of users on SocialToo.com all blacklist that same user (we have a unique algorithm that determines that, based on crowd-sourcing the definition of “Spam” on Twitter), we add that name to a global blacklist on SocialToo.com. When anyone chooses to auto-follow those that follow them on Twitter using the SocialToo! auto-follow feature, now those users will never be followed. You can now ignore them forever, hindering their reasons for being on Twitter!

SocialToo.com is a project I term, “the Companion to the Social Web”. After registering you have options such as the ability to automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter, add an automated message that gets sent to users (via dm) after they follow you for the first time, and on Facebook, redirect to your Facebook profile via yourusername.socialtoo.com. More features are being worked on for multiple social networks, and the idea is to find all the needs that just are not provided by the traditional Social Networks, and make them available to the public. If you have a need let me know. All scripts that run behind the scenes at SocialToo.com I am releasing on a single-user level via Open Source (GPL v.2) so you can run it on your own server should you desire.

The final feature, released today, is this Global, Intelligent, blacklisting feature. This feature, to me makes much more sense than services like twitterblacklist.com, since rather than depending on ratio only, we’re depending on actual user definition, by the masses to determine who is a “spammer” on Twitter. I’ll look to also integrate with twitterblacklist.com’s API in the future, and maybe even contribute back to it as we grow, but this is the start of something big. This is truly a Groundswell opportunity (I’m reading Charlene Li’s book right now) that you can be a part of.