SocialToo Puts a Stop to Automated DMs in Twitter

Posted by admin_mwc on 8 March 2009 12:00 AM in Social Networking | 4 Comments

I DO NOT disagree with SocialToo’s decision to stop automated DMs on their site but I disagree with their decision to block users who send automated DMs from other sites.

There are pros and cons of sending automated direct messages on Twitter. I believe the number one reason for auto sending welcome direct messages, auto following and auto unfollowing people on Twitter is to save TIME! Who has the time to manually do all this once you receive a lot of new followers everyday?

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About the Author

admin_mwcVince is a web designer & developer with a passion for creating web sites with clean and functional designs and source code that is valid, efficient, readable, secure and search engine friendly.

Vince is also an animal lover and vegetarian. He is currently taking his first baby steps to realise his dream of living off-the-grid in Australia so that he can live freely in a self-sufficient and eco-friendly manner.

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4 Comments On “SocialToo Puts a Stop to Automated DMs in Twitter”

Jesse Stay

On 8th March 2009 11:22 AM, Jesse Stay said:

Vincent, I think you’re misunderstood. We aren’t even doing anything with the list yet. When we do, our users will have the choice to follow auto-dmers or not. We aren’t the ones making the choice here. Our goal is simply to give users more options to choose how they want their Twitter experience to be and a lot of SocialToo Twitter users are asking for this feature right now. We’re not forcing this on anyone. I hope that’s a little more clear.

–Jesse Stay, CEO, SocialToo.com

Vincent

On 8th March 2009 3:56 PM, Vincent said:

We provided a way you can block these, both on messages from our site, and on messages from other sites that do this, and proudly, around 1,500 of you have taken advantage of this (500 of those are still sending out auto-dms despite not wanting them for themselves). This has reduced significantly the number of DMs many of you are receiving, both from us and those other sites that do this.

Starting today, we’re taking this one step further. As of this blog post, we are completely disabling auto-DMs to our users’ followers in order to stop this practice and bring back the usefulness of direct messaging again. This is a tough move for me, as many of you are using this service, and I think many don’t really have an issue with these DMs. However, with entrepreneurship comes leadership. As CEO of SocialToo, I’m taking a stand against automated DMs, and hoping other sites that do this will do the same. With what used to be a useful tool, came too much abuse, and someone needs to put an end to it. Until we can come up with a better solution we’re going to put an end to it.

In addition, starting today, while you will no longer have need for blocking SocialToo users’ automated DMs, we encourage you to invite all your friends to come check the same option you were using to block SocialToo DMs, and we’ll block other sites that do automated-dms. 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.

I am not sure where the misunderstanding is. From what I have understood from your post, auto DMs to users who use SocialToo will be blocked because of this sentence “As of this blog post, we are completely disabling auto-DMs to our users’ followers in order to stop this practice and bring back the usefulness of direct messaging again”. So do SocialToo users have a choice to block or allow auto DMs?

Jesse Stay

On 8th March 2009 4:06 PM, Jesse Stay said:

That post was to announce we were no longer sending auto-DMs for our users. They are welcome to join another service and do auto-DM there if they want – it’s not where we’re competing any more. Our focus is now on making each user’s stream of followers the way they want it to be.

That post you’re referencing had nothing to do with the @endautodms user or the people it follows.

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