This post is syndicated from the SocialToo Blog – please check it out! I think this feature’s pretty cool:

Recently Facebook launched the ability for users to checkin to any place with their mobile phone, sharing with their Facebook friends where they are and what they’re doing, but what about their Twitter friends?  Services like FourSquare and Gowalla offer the ability for users to share their checkins to Twitter as well as Facebook (or just leave them on Gowalla or Foursquare).  Facebook, with the exception of Pages, has seemed reluctant to include Twitter syncing for Facebook status updates.  That is where SocialToo comes in.  Starting today, you can now sync your Facebook checkins automatically from Facebook to Twitter using SocialToo.

The feature is completely free for anyone on Twitter and Facebook. To enable the feature, just log in to SocialToo through your Twitter account, click “Settings”, and click “Associate a Facebook Account”. Once you have both a Twitter and Facebook account linked in SocialToo, go back to the “Inbox” tab, and check the box next to “Facebook to Twitter” in the upper-right. You can now check the boxes next to the things you want to share, including, “Autopost Places” to automatically post checkins from Facebook. Once checked, any new checkin you post on Facebook will now go to Twitter.

In addition to checkins, you can also automatically post links and status updates. Any checkin with a note attached will show the note as the text of the Tweet and a link back to the checkin on Facebook. To exclude the checkin from Twitter, just add a “-” after a space at the end of your note and it won’t go to Twitter. The same goes for status updates and links that you post to Facebook.  We are also considering the potential for an opt-in “+” in the future (let us know in the comments if this is interesting to you).

Hopefully some of you find this feature useful.  We think it’s a powerful way to let others know, now on both Twitter and Facebook, where you are and what you’re doing, and has the potential to generate some interesting conversation.  Let us know how you plan to use it!

More about SocialToo:

SocialToo provides features to complement the experience people, businesses, and brands, have on the social networks they participate on. We’re a utility providing tools to help automate the process of managing a brand image, while at the same time enabling users to clean up spammy messaging, track followers and friends, and manage those friends and followers in the process. Here are some of the features we provide:

• Auto Follow – follow back the people that follow you or your brand, providing potential discovery and networking opportunities, opening up communication channels, and giving those that follow you a sense of belonging in your community
  • Auto Follow is a one-time $10 fee.
• Automatic DM and Stream filtering – do you get spammy DMs on Twitter? We’ll delete them automatically for you. Set up simple filters with keywords in DMs you don’t want to receive, then set rules, such as “unfollow”, “delete”, or “ignore” to get rid of them. Turn off Twitter’s DM e-mails and turn on ours, and we’ll also respect your rules with the DM e-mails we send, meaning if you say “ignore”, we won’t send you the DMs that match your rules. In addition, you can filter out people that say certain things in your stream, or that Tweet from specific (and some times spammy) applications.
  • DM filtering is free up to 4 filters. Stream and Application filtering comes with the monthly SocialToo Premium plan. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
• Bulk Unfollow – need to start over on Twitter? Unfollow all the people you’ve ever followed at once. Set a whitelist under “Friends” and you can exclude specific people as you do so.
  • Bulk Unfollow on Twitter is a one-time $35 fee.
• SocialToo Stats – one of our most popular features, you get a daily e-mail with all the people that followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter. We try to organize them by the Tweets we detected at the time of the unfollow or follow. We also provide additional information about each person and the ability to unfollow or follow them straight from the e-mail. In addition, for our monthly Premium users we provide an organized interface, showing a timeline of all your new follows and unfollows in a graph, your number of Tweets, and if you click through to any day it will show you the new followers and unfollowers for that day at any point we’ve tracked, along with your Tweets for that day.
  • The daily stats e-mail is a one-time $20 fee. The monthly SocialToo Premium plan is $29.95/mo, and includes every feature we offer, including support for unlimited Twitter accounts (and all features for each). There is a 7-day free trial.
• SocialToo Surveys – a “Social” way of posting quick polls to your friends on Twitter and Facebook. Create a quick poll, and share it with your friends on multiple networks. Your friends can take the poll, share it with their friends, comment on it, or create their own!

What’s a lot for one site may be miniscule for another.  Recently, Facebook announced they were removing the ability for developers to write custom Publisher boxes “due to low usage” of the feature on the site.  The feature, which enabled any application to customize the publishing experience for users, was a little-known, and little-advertised feature known to produce a good amount of traffic for applications.  It was a successful feature though, and perhaps “best-kept secret” for many developers writing for Facebook Platform.  Shortly after it launched I remember a few developers writing about how just a few tweaks to the custom Publisher and adapting the experience to each user provided tremendous conversion in application adds for users.  I was sold.

On SocialToo, one significant tool we provided was the ability to, using the custom Publisher (which is still working now, until Facebook turns it off), allow Facebook users to publish to any Twitter profile, and any Page they administer, just with a few checkboxes attached to the Publisher box at the top of Facebook.  This way users with a preference towards Facebook (which, despite the popularity of Twitter in the blogging world, is very popular amongst marketers) could easily publish to their multiple accounts on a selective basis straight from their Facebook profile.

This was a huge success for me on SocialToo – so much that despite the majority of our features being Twitter-focused, this one small feature was bringing in a significant amount of conversions for me.  Users would authorize the SocialToo app, get the publishing feature, and at the same time learn about the other tools we provided for Twitter and elsewhere on SocialToo, purchasing our premium features straight from Facebook.  20% of my traffic came from Facebook as a result.  Near 15,000 of my 70,000+ users were using the application.

Yet, according to Facebook’s response on a developer forum post, they seem to be looking at mostly usage of the Publisher, not net-effect towards conversion (which is why developers were using the publisher – it was an advertising tool for their apps).  According to Facebook:

“We understand that the publisher feature was successfully used by some developers and enjoyed by users.  While it’s never easy to have a feature removed, we made this decision only after carefully reviewing the feature’s usage over time. For the sake of transparency, here are some basic usage stats that illustrate the approximate daily usage:
-          47 applications with more than 1000 stream publishes
-          10 applications with more than 10K stream publishes
-          0 applications with more than 100K stream publishes”

Usage of the publisher, number of publishes, etc. is an important factor, but Facebook still seems to be neglecting what those 10,000+ stream publishes per day were producing for those developers in terms of monetary value and overall conversions.  For my application, it was priceless.

I’m disappointed that Facebook is killing this feature.  I’m disappointed that they did it with such short notice and without it being on the roadmap they revealed at the end of 2009.  Yes, the numbers, according to Facebook, are small, but with only one document tucked away on the developers wiki devoted towards the subject can you blame it for being such a non-used feature?  From my own experience, the conversions alone it produced, and the utility it provided were enough to make it well worth the integration, and I promoted it to all my clients.

If usage was so low, it certainly wasn’t because it wasn’t useful or valuable.  It was because Facebook didn’t promote it or show the usefulness well enough.  Perhaps the API for it was too complicated – I don’t know.  I do know this is one of the many Facebook Platform features that have gone away that will be sorely missed.

I think one thing with Facebook Platform we can now be sure of is that while Facebook continues to increase usefulness of their platform on the web, their own website’s platform on apps.facebook.com is slowly being removed, piece by piece.  If this is the case I really wish they would put that on their roadmap.  As for the custom Publisher – this developer is drastically effected by its removal.

In a Keynote at Chirp by Ryan Sarver, Project Manager over the Twitter API, he announced a new, full API around live content streaming that just saved me thousands.  The new API enables a real-time layer around not just Tweets and search that they’ve enabled in the past, but now direct messages, follows, favorites, and retweets.  As users follow, direct message, or favorite, developers will now be able to pull these actions for each user in real time.

One of the biggest headaches of my own on SocialToo has been the need to constantly poll Twitter.com for new follows and unfollows.  Each request requires an entire snapshot of the user’s friends and followers, and with Twitter’s current structure, can take minutes up to even a half hour or more to pull an entire snapshot of a user’s list of friends.  This takes bandwidth, takes time, and costs money on both the developer’s servers and on Twitter’s end.

The new API will enable one request per follow, one request per DM, and the great thing about it is all of it happens as the user clicks “follow”, as the user sends the DM, and the User benefits from a real-time, live update on new follows and DMs on sites like SocialToo.com.  So, assuming developers are given access soon, you will soon be able to have real-time updates on new followers and unfollowers, as well as new, filtered DMs on sites like SocialToo.com (if you haven’t signed up go sign up today!).

I’m excited for this new announcement, and it’s something I’ve been asking the Twitter API team for awhile now.  It’s good to see Twitter finally getting the capacity to work on these requests.  I hope to continue to see work on developers’ needs like this.

In an unprecedented move, Laura Fitton’s OneForty.com launched their own app store for Twitter today, enabling Twitter developers to finally have a platform to sell and promote their apps in a single location, to a large audience.  The company, with apps that you can purchase for Twitter, will become like iTunes or even Amazon, in enabling developers to sell, and Twitter app seekers to find and purchase, in a virtual Twitter marketplace.  My startup, SocialToo, is proud to be one of the companies launching with OneForty in this effort.

We know with the launch of the iTunes app store that bringing developers to a single location that others can search, find, and purchase apps, has proven to be a lucrative business for developers.  This launch will make Twitter itself a similar breeding ground for new entrepreneurial ideas and business opportunities that were previously not thought of.  The completion of an app store is the icing on the already baking Twitter ecosystem cake that should seal the deal for many entrepreneurs and developers in why they should write Twitter apps.

What can you purchase from SocialToo?

Until now you have already been able to purchase several features on the SocialToo website – those include the ability to unfollow everyone you’ve followed on Twitter at once, catching up those who followed you before joining SocialToo that you want to follow back, along with a powerful daily e-mail that includes stats as to who followed you and stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  In fact, we just announced an affiliate program which enables anyone with a Twitter account to gain a cut of the revenues just by sharing with their friends on Twitter!

With today’s launch with OneForty, we are starting by allowing users to purchase our daily stats e-mail that sends you a digest of who followed you and who stopped following you the previous day on Twitter.  Because our current services are one-time for life, it gives us a unique opportunity to offer one-time purchases like this on 3rd party sites like OneForty.  The specific stats e-mail we’re offering on OneForty sells for just $20, and you get it for life.  In fact, because you’ve already given your e-mail address to OneForty, once you’ve purchased, you don’t even have to ever visit SocialToo.com (although we always appreciate the visit!) – you’ll start receiving stats e-mails the very next day.

I’m excited for this new development.  OneForty has already proven to be one of the best ways to find apps in the Twitter ecosystem.  It can only get better now as developers are able to now start monetizing their offerings through the directory.

So if you get a chance, go on over to OneForty and try out the SocialToo stats e-mail.  Be sure to leave us a review!  This is an incredible opportunity I’m proud to be a part of.

I’m opening the books tonight on my company, SocialToo.  I’ll be presenting tonight at Launchup, an event compared to be a “community barn raising for entrepreneurs”.  The event happens every couple months and has featured such Utah companies as TodaysMama (whom I am an Advisor) and Entice Labs.  The idea is to allow each company a short time to present (I have 7 minutes), expose themselves in as transparent a manner as possible, then let the community ask questions and provide advice and help in helping that business grow.

Tonight I’ll be sharing all the details most businesses won’t share about themselves with SocialToo – yes, it’s a risk, but I am a big believer in transparency. You’ll hear about how many users we have, how much revenue we’re bringing in per month, where I see our weaknesses and strengths to be, etc.  I’ll show you a demo about how you can get set up with a SocialToo account and DM spam filters for Twitter in under 2 minutes with just the click of a button.

This week Launchup will also start bringing these entrepreneur features to the world with Ustream.  You can watch anywhere in the world on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/launchup or on the main website at http://www.launchup.org/live.  The event starts at 6pm, and will also feature presentations by MuseBuzz and PageMass (which I got a demo of yesterday – I think bloggers are going to like this one).  Launchup is organized by Jeremy Hanks, CEO and founder of Doba.com, another Guy Kawasaki Advisorship company (as is SocialToo).  Come join and say hi!

You can read a brief Q&A I did for them at http://www.launchup.org/2009/11/09/socialtoo-qa/.

Tonight for about a full hour many Rackspace sites, including their own Slicehost service, inquisitr.com, Laughing Squid-hosted sites, Posterous, Tr.im, and even my own SocialToo.com.  Ben Parr of Mashable even noticed, asking if a bunch of websites has all just crashed.  I was reminded to check the status of my own site by a few posts by Duncan Riley on FriendFeed.com/Twitter, followed by a blog post of his own.  That prompted me to realize my entire site had been down for over an hour, which prompted me to check their Twitter account, which prompted me to check their status blog that gave a few more details.

This got me thinking – why are services so reliant on Twitter to get the word out to their customers?  Have we gotten that lazy? In the past a service with “Fanatical Support” would have sent out a brief e-mail to their customers notifying them of the update.  Do they just expect all their customers to be checking every single one of their Twitter updates?  I have to admit as a customer I’m a bit disappointed.

I don’t mean to pick on just Rackspace though.  Rackspace aren’t the only ones doing this.  It has come to be common practice amongst companies to just post status updates on their own Twitter account and (occasionally) blog without using the oldest means of notification, a push means for that matter out to their users – e-mail.  I admit even my own service SocialToo has been guilty of this occasionally and I have vowed for more mission-critical issues facing my customers that we will try to be more diligent in letting them know, via e-mail of the issues facing them, as soon as possible.  That said, I’m one of two employees/contractors working for the company right now, as compared to Rackspace’s and other companies’ hundreds.

I think it’s time companies that provide mission-critical services start laying off the Twitter Kool-Aid, and focusing on more serious means such as e-mail so their customers can become aware, as the issues are happening to the accounts they pay for.  It’s time we get back to using e-mail as a communications medium.  Now that I’m aware of the issue, I’m checking their blog frequently for updates, but a simple e-mail would have made huge strides in making the $600 I pay monthly to the service more worth it.

As of the end of this writing it appears the problems are mostly resolved.  I am anxiously awaiting an e-mail explaining the problem, but hope in the future they can get infrastructure in place to quickly notify us via e-mail as fast as they were able to do on Twitter.  I hope other services can also learn from this and prepare for similar circumstances.  While I’ll continue to enjoy the service I’ve had from Slicehost, I would have liked to see more than just a Twitter update surrounding this.

UPDATE: Ironically, Ed Millard on FriendFeed pointed out that the support address for Rackspace is twitter@rackspace.com. sigh

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.