Blogger and Entrepreneur Ouriel Ohayon, previously of Techcrunch.fr, and Israeli developer Arik Fraimovichis are about to launch what I can only describe as the most useful Twitter app I am ever likely to use – it’s called Topify.
Yes, I said this just yesterday with a similar app called Twimailer which sent you full profiles of new followers via email , but Topify takes things to a completely different level. Let me explain…
How Does Topify Work?
Once you’re all signed up, Topify hands a unique email address over to you which you insert into the “settings” of your twitter account. Once you’ve done that, you are all set and you will now be able to do the following:
- Receive full profiles of new followers via email. The profile includes bio, location, follower counts, updates count, date they joined Twitter and their last update.
- Reply to Follow To follow back new followers simply hit reply and send! That is it. You’ll get a confirmation via email that you have started following them too. (One small request here would be to be made aware if I am already following the person.)
- Reply to DM’s via Email Quite possibly the sweetest icing on the cake, you can reply via email to Twitter direct messages. Again, you can receive confirmation your message has been sent.
Frankly, I am not only excited but extremely impressed with the work put into the app and the results. The app works smoothly and whilst I don’t often say this – I can’t recommend it highly enough.
One concern I had as I’m sure many others will have too…privacy. I addressed the concern over whether private DM’s would be viewable by the Topify team. Ohayon replied stating
“we would have to change the way we conceived the service. security and privacy are top priorities for us”
I believe him however frankly whether this service existed or not, I would never recommend sharing any private or intimate details via Twitter DM anyway.
The service is currently in private beta but should be opening within the next few days – so sign up here to get involved.
Sounds like a great idea, but doesn’t changing one’s twitter email in settings mean you’re handing over control to anyone who can get to that email? How do we know we’ll be safe?
Heheheh. I’m not accusing them, they’re probably hoping to make more money from ads than stealing tweets.
If they were scammers (and I’m definitely not saying they are), then they really wouldn’t care about their reputation anyway.
I’m just awaiting my beta invite to test on a dummy twitter account before giving it a try for real.
Does a new email a new mail account on Topify? Then I would have to look after one more mail account?
The invite only process is due to the high demand – we don’t want our servers to crash all of the sudden (will make a lot of people upset), but to grow gradually. But we release invites faster now and we hope to get rid of the invite only process next week.
Only problem with Topify is that it is beta and you have to wait for a beta invite.
Twimailer only asks for the email but Topify asks for both email and Twitter account.
On top of that, Topify is not even launched yet!
I’ll stick with http://twimailer.com
gagawow nice one!
Frankly, you’re in there hands David. But what I think is…we’ve got their names, we know who the owners are – if they screw their users their careers and reputations are in tatters for life. I don’t think they’d risk it.
No. The email address you get from us forwards all the received notifications to your current mail account. We only serve as a pipe.