A week ago, without any prior notice, Twitter changed their backend resulting in removing headers from their emails which we used to provide you the Topify service. Once I discovered about this change, I asked on their official developers support forum about it and twice sent a mention to @TwitterAPI account. All of these were unanswered until today. Today they finally posted a clarification:

Many of the emails we send have X-Twitter* headers in them, with pieces of information about the event which triggered them. You might have noticed we've started decommissioning these headers.

If for some reason you were using these headers programmatically in order to detect / process events, you should stop doing it and switch to one of the means supported by the API. For example, the Streaming API. Please let us know if you needed help or if you had questions!

(from: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/708)

I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to expriment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.

Topify was conceived as a response to long frustration with useless emails. Emails that you couldn’t process from your inbox, emails that had very frustrating mobile experience. Topify was sort of experiment, to see if it can be done better. Judging by your response and adoption, the experiment was successful. 

What do you need to do? Go to your Twitter settings page: https://twitter.com/settings/account and change the email address there to your own email address.

I would like to use the opportunity and thank Nicolas Toper from CritSend. Nicolas helped me since the beginning both by providing Topify a reliable deliverability solution for emails and by the helpful advices he gave along the way. I also would like to thank you, our users. You made all of these into a very fun and rewarding experience.

If you have any comments feel free to leave them here, email me personally: arik@arikfr.com or tweet (@arikfr).

Thank you !

Arik Fraimovich (@arikfr)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

As many of your already noticed, you no longer receive our email notifications but the regular Twitter notifications. This is due to a technical change that Twitter made in their email notifications, which results in us unable to determine the type of message.

While it is possible to determine the type of notification from the message text, we prefer not to do that as it's usually unstable (anytime Twitter will change thier email text wording can result in issues). We're looking into options as to what should we do, but currently you will receive Twitter's regular emails.

Please note that:

1. You can't reply to these notifications.

2. If you forward us your notifications from Gmail, please disable this rule because we no longer able to determine who to send it back to.

If you have any further questions, feel free to leave a comment here, ask on Twitter (@Topify) or by email (help @ topify.com).

Thanks.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

What Happened?

Login to Twitter.com and in case you see the following message:

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

If you haven’t been receiving notifications from us in the last few days, you better visit Twitter’s web version and verify that you don’t see the above message. If you do see it, please choose the option to “try sending message to your email address again”.

To those of you who are curious why do you even see this message — well, a few days ago our hosting provider had an hour outage due to network failure. If Twitter tried sending you a notification at this time, it would appear to them as if your email address isn’t working.

Obviously, we’re taking measures to make sure that this won’t happen again.

It appears that it wasn’t our fault at all — one of Twitter’s email sending servers was marked for spam, and therefore our servers were rejecting it. We have now whitelisted that server and it shouldn’t (hopefully) happen again.

Thank you for your understanding.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Starting from today (August 16th, 2010) Twitter will start deprecating “Basic Auth” (3rd party applications authentication with plain username & password) and will start moving all 3rd party applications to OAuth.

What it means for you is that you need to verify that your Topify account is OAuth enabled. To do that, just visit our OAuth page. (if you never provided us your Twitter account password, most chances are that you are already OAuth enabled)

Switching to OAuth has many benefits with more security and control for you is the biggest one of them. Once you enable OAuth on your Topify account, we will no longer store your password. Another benefit is that you can always revoke our access from the connections settings page on Twitter, if you need to.

Please let us know if you need any help with this process.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

You asked for it, and we heard you - we removed the need to confirm the actions you do via the links in the notifications. We added the secondary confirmation only to the users who actually need it.

Enjoy :)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

As some of you already noticed, when you click on a link to follow/block/mark as spam a user, you will have to confirm this action on the opening web page:

The reason we added this extra step is because of some users had antivirus software that were scanning their emails and checking the links in them. When those antivirus programs were visiting the links, they were causing the different actions to be taken. We couldn’t filter out the different antivirus programs, because they disguise themselves as normal users, therefore we had to add this extra step.

We would love to hear your ideas on how to deal with this without the extra step, but for now we will have to keep the extra step. 

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Topify has been in private beta for too long now and it’s time to move on. So far we were financing Topify from our own pockets. But in order to make Topify available for everyone, it will have to generate some revenue (at least to cover its costs), and therefore it’s time to introduce some premium features.

Like many others in our industry, we thought about going freemium. What we had in mind is offering the current service as the free version and have premium versions (with the features you’ve been requesting for so long) for some price:

(creating tables in Tumblr is a pain, you can find a text version of this table here)

(clarification: all accounts will have DM notifications like today. By “Fast DM delivery” we mean that premium users will get their notifications faster)

This is just our first thoughts on this. The features list was compiled based on your feedback so far. The prices are made up from thin air, it just numbers that seemed right. They probably will change and we might add some other options.

The reason that we post this so early on, is to hear what you think. What we have in mind doesn’t really matter — it’s what you have in mind that matters most. Because if no one is interested in the premium features, we better think of something else :)

So what do you think about this? Would you be willing to pay for Topify premium?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

UPDATE: Twitter are in contact with SpamCop to resolve this issue. Meanwhile we whitelisted their servers on ours. Please make sure that you email address wasn’t flagged as inactive (and if it was, please follow the instructions below).

UPDATE 2: We updated the instructions on how to fix this, if your account was affected.

Today some of Twitter mail servers were marked as sending spam by SpamCop:

128.121.146.153 listed in bl.spamcop.net (127.0.0.2)

If there are no reports of ongoing objectionable email from this system it will be delisted automatically in approximately 14 hours.

Causes of listing

• System has sent mail to SpamCop spam traps in the past week (spam traps are secret, no reports or evidence are provided by SpamCop)
• SpamCop users have reported system as a source of spam about 10 times in the past week

I’m not sure how this happened, but it is. This causes our servers to filter messages sent from the marked servers. We notified Twitter of this situation and we hope that they will address it soon.

But the problem is that besides that some messages will be lost, because of how Twitter mail system works, if it can’t deliver message to an address for a few times it marks it as non working and gives the user the following message:

If you received this message on your account, please do the following to make Twitter send you notifications again:

1. Don’t panic :)
2. Click on the link that says “click here to try sending messages to your email address again”.
3. If this doesn’t help, please contact us by email - <help@topify.com>.

If SpamCop doesn’t whitelist Twitter soon, we will do it ourselves. But we keep this as a last resort option, so we won’t expose you to spam.

To keep updated on how this resolves, please follow us on Twitter - @topify, if you haven’t done so yet.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

1 hour ago Twitter made their new spam reporting method available to us developers as part of their API. As of 15 minutes ago, when you report someone for spam from Topify, it’s the same as reporting from Twitter’s UI. So in case you were wondering - you continue doing the same action you’ve been doing until now from Topify, and we take care for the details.

We also changed the text on our notifications from “Block & Report” to “Report For Spam”, to be consistent with Twitter.

Hopefully this is one step closer to cleaning Twitter from spam.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

We heard your feedback about the previous DM notifications design and we did another iteration (shamelessly borrowing ideas from Twitter). What do you think of it now?

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

It seems that a new Twitter worm is using hijacked accounts to send to the friends of the affected account a link to a phishing site.

We advise not to visit the URL and for those who were affected, we advise to update immediately their Twitter password. If you only received this DM, but haven’t visited it - you probably have nothing to worry about. We do suggest that you delete it (just in case).

UPDATE: Mashable reports the same and Twitter staff just posted a warning on their @spam account: “A bit o’phishing going on — if you get a weird direct message, don’t click on it and certainly don’t give your login creds!”

Safe surfing and tweeting. :)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Fred Wilson wrote a great post about email few days ago -

In this day and age of social media and an ever expanding set of communication tools (SMS, IM, Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, etc) it is easy to forget about email. But that would be a big mistake. 
[…]
If you are building a web service, you should most certainly build regular email communication with your users/members as one of the key features of your service.

Fred Wilson, “Don’t Forget About Email”

We couldn’t agree more with Fred, because email is the core of Topify. But having a regular email communication with your users isn’t just enough. You need to make your email communication effective and useful to the users.

We started Topify because most web services while having email communication with their users, have very un-useful emails, which are more burden to the user than use. The first use case that we decided to try out and improve was Twitter’s email notifications.

Some of the non-usefulness of the emails web services send this days, comes from their intent to use the emails to bring traffic to the website. But it’s a mistake, because too shallow emails are being left unread in the inbox and become a burden to the user. Instead of that, good (useful) emails while don’t generate traffic to the website (coming directly from the email) can increase the overall interaction with the site. And after all, interaction with the service is the goal.

That’s our $0.2 on the topic. Would love to hear your opinion on that too.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

A few weeks ago we introduced a very simple way to block or mark a user as spam from Topify notifications. We realized we could save you a few more clicks and that’s why today we introduce a new dead simple way to do that.

You just need to press 1 click.

You read well. 1 click

At the end of any email notifications you’ll find the option to do that. By clicking “click here” we automatically process the blocking/Spam marking process. And a follow up email confirmation will be sent.

For mobile users it will still be probably more convenient to keep forwarding the notifications to our unique emails adress block@topify.com and spam@topify.com [we recommend you add those adresses to your contact book], instead of pressing those 1-click links that actually open a browser page to confirm your action (unless you have a super fast iphone/mobile browser)

So check your topify notifications now

So there you go. A few less clicks a a little more time for you.

This is what Topify is all about

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Topify up! :)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Try Twitter for example. Thanks to its API we created Topify which enables you to receive improved email notifications on followers request and manage smartly your Direct Messages.

China Blocked twitter. But twitter is still working via Topify, since email is not blocked (not yet…)

So if you are a chinese user you can jump on Topify and keep enjoying the service, in its basic form.

if you want to create an account get an invite here http://bit.ly/gotopify

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

SpyMaster seems to be a great game using Twitter messaging system to alert/notify your friends. But like all great games, it isn’t for eveyrone. You might end up being annoyed by Direct Messages inviting you to join the party, even by people you really want to follow, but still don’t want to block. A SpyMaster is not necessarily a SpamMaster, but you need more control.

Today, we introduce a way to filter those Direct Messages. Simply. When you receive a Direct Message notification from Topify referring to Spymaster, simply forwarded it to

StopSpymaster@topify.com

We automatically will filter any Direct Message related to the game and will notify the sender not to send you more messages related to the game:

We hesitated to include in the process a mechanism to delete totally the direct message from Twitter, so that you don’t receive it at all in other clients and twitter readers. If this is something that you want let us know in comments.

Of course, like with other Topify features, we let you in control. If you change your mind and want to receive Direct Messages related to SpyMaster one day, just go to your dashboard and change the settings.

Actually we are thinking about enabling this feature more more generic terms. So now you have another good reason to register a Topify account.

Not a Topify user? While Topify is in private beta, you can use the following link to register: http://topify.com/invite/gotopify

There you go!

update: TechCrunch has spotted the news. They mention and rightly so that SpyMaster has an optout feature. But if you are on the go or don’t have the time to open your browser, or simply have no clue what SpyMaster is, it is just much much much simpler to block any incoming DM right from your inbox. And in addition you ll have an opportunity to notify back the sender right away

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

Your 140 character Bio?

marketing consultant, business developer, social media addict, writer, storyteller, husband, father, wonderer, procrastinator, ever mindful

What do you tweet about? And how long have you been on Twitter ? How do you tweet?

I’ve been using Twitter since 8/8/08. I usually use TweetDeck or TinyTwitter. I tweet about ideas, questions or experiences that I think are interesting, amusing or enlightening. Subjects include my profession (marketing) and personal interests, such as creative writing. I continue to be amazed and delighted by the range of thoughtful and helpful tweeps out there.

When and how did you discover Topify and how do you use it ?

I discovered Topify about a month ago. Like many users, I found the standard Twitter new follower notifications very lacking. I tried another twitter notification tool that did not live up to its promise. Of course, the Twitter community turned out to be a great crowdsourcing tool for recommendations for alternatives, and that’s how I found Topify.

The new follower notifications I get via Topify are so much more useful. They not only include the user’s follower, following and update count, but also their bio and recent tweets. Best of all, I can follow back by replying to the email or DM by replying if I am already following. I can easily manage my new twitter followers as I manage my inbox.

I have tried to “pay it forward” by introducing other twitter users to topify.

What is the main benefit for you of using Topify?

Simplicity.

What would you add to topify to improve it?

I am interested to know why twitter followers choose to follow me. It would be cool to have Topify’s notification emails reference my most recent tweet (or someone else’s reply or retweet to something I tweeted) prior to the new follow.

Why do you think Topify is the best option out there to manage followers by email?

Topify gets it. They provide a free, full-featured solution to follower management by email that works as advertised. Simple and effective.

What are your favourite twitter apps (after Topify of course…)?

TweetDeck for the desktop and TinyTwitter for blackberry are my favorite clients. I’ve also recently discovered UberTwitter, which is a very powerful client for the blackberry. DoesFollow.com is a great little utility that lets you see if one person is following another.

What other networks do you use?

LinkedIn and Facebook.

If topify was a bird it would be ?

A hummingbird. Small, fast, fun to watch.

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

bye bye spam on topify (via misteroo)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

jump to min 38.20sec

Permalink | Leave a comment  »