Improving the Twitter Web With SocialToo

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socialtoo.pngI 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.

2 Responses to “Improving the Twitter Web With SocialToo”

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  1. sterling | bizlift says:

    Wow, I didn’t realize the blacklist feature gathered data from across multiple accounts for intelligent flagging of spammers. Very cool.

    I think it’s great that you’re releasing code for single-user use. What framework are you using for SocialToo code?

  2. Jesse Stay says:

    Sterling, the website is built on Perl’s Catalyst framework. Thus far I’ve released the auto-follow script as open source (need to add in my recent updates still) - that can be found here:

    http://staynalive.com/articles/2007/11/14/auto-follow-those-that-follow-you-on-twitter/

    Be sure to check out the link in the comments to patch Net::Twitter or it won’t work!

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