SocialToo squashes twitter auto DM’s

Jan 3, 2009 by Dan Taylor    18 Comments    Posted under: Social Media, Technology

One of the nice features about twitter is the ability to Direct Message a fellow follower, and not put your entire conversation out there for the world to read (some things are just better left between party A and party B).  Conversely, the opposite is true: Automated DM’s can be a bit on the spammy side; ‘Thanks for following me, enter this code at www.xyz.com to receive a discount”.  This generally leads to an immediate ‘unfollow’ on my part, which is rather sad, as sometimes some of these people are genuinely adding meaningful points to a discussion.

The solution?  SocialToo.  SocialToo is an interesting tool that will allow you to tweak your twitter config.  SocialToo also plays nicely with facebook and indenti.ca.  Founder Jesse Stay apparently got a bit sick of the auto DM as well, and recently released a feature setting that will allow SocialToo users turn off auto direct messages from other SocialToo users if so desired.  SocialToo will also allow for blacklisting twitter users, auto-follow people that follow you, and auto-unfollow those that unfollow you, send an auto DM to those that follow you (highly NOT recommended) and as previously mentioned, disable auto DM’s.

But don’t just take my word for it, Chris Brogan makes an awesome case for using SocialToo, and squashing those auto DM’s at the source.

I URGE you to recommend that everyone use SocailToo for their robot behaviors. Because hey, if they want to, it’s a great service. But better still, it means I will never see a SocialToo robot DM ever again.

A simple check of the ‘Turn off automatic Direct Messages from other SocialToo.com users’ box is all that needs to be done.  Remember, this won’t turn off ALL automatic DM’s, as users need to be SocialToo users as well, and most spammers will certainly avoid this, but it’s a good start, and hopefully technology that twitter itself will adopt (read:buy).

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