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SocialToo Announces SocialSurveys!

Posted on November 19, 2008 by jessestay

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.

Announcing Follower Messaging and Follow Statistics for SocialToo.com

Posted on October 30, 2008 by jessestay

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!

SocialToo.com Now Supports Identi.ca

Posted on July 27, 2008 by jessestay

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.

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Improving the Twitter Web With SocialToo

Posted on April 29, 2008 by jessestay

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.

Stay N’ Alive Productions and SocialToo.com Present Facebook "Chat-B-Gone" (#web20expo)

Posted on April 24, 2008 by jessestay

I’m sitting in here at the Blogger Lounge at Web 2.0 Expo, and have been working on a cool little gadget I think you may like. Mari Smith yesterday Tweeted that she and others wished there was a way they could “turn off” Facebook chat. Right now there are privacy controls to block people and keep people from chatting with you, but there is no real way to turn off the Chat feature in Facebook.

So I created a simple little Greasemonkey script (works in Firefox only, sorry) under the GPL v.2, in conjunction with SocialToo.com‘s “Social Companion to the Web” theme, that I call, “Facebook Chat-B-Gone”. Go ahead and download and install Greasemonkey here, then click here to download “Facebook Chat-B-Gone”.

Enjoy! And be sure to sign up for SocialToo.com for more cool “companion” features like this in the future!

http://staynalive.local/wp-content/themes/revvedup-158/fbchatbegone.user.js

I’ve Been Guy Kawasaki’d!

Posted on April 3, 2008 by jessestay

Greetings to all of my new subscribers, thanks to a great post I’ve been working on with Guy Kawasaki over on his blog here:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/04/ten-things-you.html

The post is about 10 things you didn’t know about Facebook – these are all excerpts that you can find bits and pieces about in “I’m On Facebook–Now What???“, with a few additions. I’m really glad Guy put me to task to put this list together. Be sure to purchase one of his books as well!

The story behind this post is both Guy Kawasaki and Chris Pirillo were looking for a way to automatically follow those that follow them on Twitter, so they could better communicate with their fan-base. I decided to take this as an opportunity (as I wanted the same feature for myself), and wrote http://socialtoo.com to do just that for them. They both signed up (see Chris Pirillo’s post here – he mistakingly thought I worked for Twitter), and Guy Kawasaki generously offered to promote the book Jason Alba and I wrote, “I’m On Facebook–Now What???” via his blog. The funny thing is I was actually able to use Guy’s, “I know you would do the same for me…” as Guy thanked me for helping him out.

After my experience with Guy I respect him even more. Without my asking he offered to help me out – this is now my new mantra. When you do good things for others, looking for their needs, in my opinion, regardless of pay it always comes back to you. I will be devoting my time on Sundays to help out charitable causes such as Takes All Types (recently featured here and here), not necessarily because I’m expecting anything out of it, but because I know it helps other people, and just knowingly that always comes around for good on your behalf in the end. Thank you Guy for your sincere promotion of my book in your article!

If you’re looking for Facebook consulting, or have an external application outside, or inside a social network you would like to consider including as part of SocialOptimize’s community of Social Applications, please contact me at the links on the right – I promise I will get back to you!

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