SocialToo offers various Twitter-based services, such as automatically sending a message to someone who follows you, emailing you daily with a list of key terms mentioned on Twitter and, until today, automatically unfollowing someone if they unfollow you.
We say “until today” because, according to SocialToo CEO Jesse Stay, Twitter has asked them to disable the automatic unfollow service.
According to a statement that we just received from Stay:
“I just wanted to make you aware of a change we’re making on SocialToo at the request of Twitter. As of February 1, we will no longer be offering the service to automatically unfollow those who unfollow you. We have turned off the ability to purchase this service if you had not previously purchased it, but you can run it as many times as you like until February 1. I encourage you to read more about this on our blog at https://web.archive.org/web/20131229113208/http://blog.socialtoo.com:80/2010/01/14/per-twitters-request-were-removing-auto-unfollow where we explain more about why Twitter is requiring us to remove this feature.
Removing this feature is as disappointing for us as it is for you and we are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We are working on solutions in the meantime that will hopefully replace this feature and have Twitter’s blessing at the same time. All of our other services, including daily stats e-mails, automatic DM filtering and unfollow based on keyword, as well as our bulk unfollow everyone you ever followed will still remain. Please don’t hesitate to contact me personally by responding to this e-mail if you have any questions.”
So why? Why would Twitter tell SocialToo to disable the automatic unfollow feature?
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According to Stay’s blog post, Twitter made the demand because “they claim that auto-unfollow “perpetuates the idea that Twitter is about follower counts.”
How do you Twitter users feel about this?
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Laurence, actually, SocialToo offers a completely automated bulk unfollow solution still. Try it out!
Twitter outlawed the use of Bulk Unfollow earlier this year. Some programs still have the option but they don’t don’t have a Select All option so if you want to unfollow 5,000 people that means you need to check a box 5,000 times – not good!
I found a workaround that allows you to mass unfollow in minutes:
http://tinyurl.com/25ocblh
Hoping people find this useful because Twitter is being abused by everyone and unfollowing spammers is very righteous.
Only to let you know: Even Twitter Karma is discontinuing Auto-Follow by request of Twitter:
“On January 15, 2010, Twitter instructed us to remove the “bulk unfollow” capability of Twitter Karma as it has been determined to violate their Automation Rules and Best Practices. We have done so in order to comply with their request. We apologize to you, our users, for having to make this change, but hope you will understand it is outside of our control.”
Furthermore it seems to be, if you try to unfollow a lot of Twitter accounts manually, account by account, you will be unable to follow more people at this time for more than 24 hours. I was blocked from following for 36 to 48 hours.
The problem is that this decission is momentous for Twitter, e. g. you cannot tell a SEO to let links to other sites existing if other sites delete their links during link exchange. I see a bad future of Twitter, if they continue with this strategy. More and more Spammers are coming and more and more real people are leaving Twitter. Some day it could be the biggest Spammer network in the world.
Jesse, you are absolutely right (of course), I apologize… it is SocialOomph that used to be TweetLater. We have fixed it to remove the erroneous reference to TweetLater.
Just a correction – SocialToo was never TweetLater. I think you’re confusing us with another service.
I am glad to see this. Its not about follower counts.. for me. Of course I’d like lots of followers, but refuse to make a sham of it.