SocialToo (with help from Twitter) made me a masochist…
by Stii
I’m not one for kinky S&M stuff. I’m a wimp when it comes to pain. I opened up Twitter this morning to find that all the people I followed were gone. People that follow me are fine. People I followed, gone.
(Image credit: http://slackerschronicles.blogspot.com)
A couple of months I signed up for SocialToo. It is a coolish application I thought at the time, but it turned out to be annoying.
- It enables you to follow those who follow you automatically. A really bad idea it turned out to be! It blindly follows anyone who follow you, without even leaving the choice up to you. Yes, even the spammers. :P
- It unfollow anyone not following you. You guessed it, bad idea! There are some very cool Twitter streams which you just have to follow, whether they follow back or not. I have a strong suspicion this is the functionality that left me not following anyone!
- It sends an direct message to anyone who follows you. Can you say SPAM?! Ugh, yes, it is quite handy, but getting back DM’s like “No worries, I already read your blog!” makes you feel like a dumbass! Not cool. Seems, this feature you cannot disable anymore. :P
- It sends you daily stats about people who you followed and people who unfollowed you. This is cool if you’re into that sort of thing and worried about it.
You can select to disable these features. You cannot delete your account, which is what I’d like to do since the above features created me more headaches than I can handle. Some Twitter users might thrive on these services, I don’t.
Here is what I think happened:
- Twitter had one of its many database outages.
- SocialToo checked to see who unfollowed me and who it should drop.
- Twitter returned 0 followers.
- SocialToo thought, “Cool, not a problem, unfollow everyone then!”
- Twitter came back and things were all good with people following me.
- SocialToo already unfollowed everyone for me.
How do I know this? Got the follow/unfollow stats email stating that 810 people unfollowed me. :P Nice.
My advice to you is unless you’re one of those “Get 1000000000000000 twitter followers and you’re a Demi-god” people, stay away from SocialToo.
That sucks. 810 is a lot of people to swift through :/ and to add again without adding the many spammers.
Bummer dude.
Stii, I’m sorry that happened to you. I’m constantly working on new ways to prevent things like that from happening. However, if you have auto-follow on, within a few hours it should follow everyone back again as soon as Twitter corrects their following counts. Regarding auto-dms, we became the first service of this type to turn those off this last weekend.
To delete your account, as the FAQs state, it’s very easy. Just e-mail us at contact@socialtoo.com and I’ll personally take care of you.
Jesse Stay
CEO, SocialToo.com
Thank you for responding Jesse. It is quite refreshing to see someone actually caring enough about their product to respond to a meager post! ;-)
I’ll give it some thought and give some suggestions.
Thank you for the link…