Refollow

Refollow Facebook

With the term “social networking” cropping up in quantity, and with the expanse of users currently on Facebook, it has become difficult to “friend” someone whom you would actually qualify as a friend. Call it Circles, Degrees, Groups, or Types, we all have a variation of friend-levels or networks with which we are connected. What’s the best way to differentiate and keep track of these different connections?

Introducing Refollow for Facebook, a Facebook relationship manager developed by Originate.

RefollowFB is a powerful tool designed to help Facebook users discover new people and content that matches their profile and interests, and additionally it gives users a better way to manage and view their current Facebook connections. Making extensive use of labeling and filters for displaying friends, the interface is intuitive, organized, and simple to learn. Within RefollowFB, users can quickly view information about specific connections, explore public profiles, filter out irrelevant data, sort friends by network type, and message Facebook friends or post directly from their RefollowFB page. Overall, RefollowFB makes your search more powerful and targeted, by allowing users to discover new people, organizations, communities, and brands that align with their interests. Best of all, it’s a free app, so new users can jump in to test it out, without any obligation.

RefollowFB is not only for the casual Facebook user, but will also be used by PR agencies who want to better understand their client’s followers, and by brands who want to gain introspection into their consumer groups. In monitoring this data, RefollowFB creates opportunities for deeper analytics and usage pattern analysis, helping create more powerful connections with followers or fans.

While the application is currently stand-alone, Originate plans to integrate RefollowFB into Facebook so users can access this level of friendship management in or outside of their Facebook page.

Refollow for Facebook has a companion product, Refollow for Twitter that has been successfully helping individuals and brands manage their Twitter relationships since 2009. 

UnMarketing Refollow Mention

Thank you to Scott Stratten for using Refollow, mentioning us in UnMarketing and in the blog post below:

http://www.unmarketing.com/2010/01/05/saran-wrap-series-my-transparency-on-twitter/

A few answers to your many great questions

Q. Can I cancel my subscription at any time, or do you lock me in for life?

A. Of course you can cancel at any time. The billing is done every 30 days. So you will automatically be billed by Paypal at the beginning of each period for whole 30 days. If you cancel, you’ll still get access for the rest of that time you already paid for, but you won’t be charged for the next month (or ever again). If you cancel right away because you think we suck, then just email us at support@refollow.com and we’ll give you your money back. We want you to be happy and get value! P.S. Disputing the credit card charge in that case is fully unnecessary :)

Q. I have 1000 Twitter accounts and want to pay you way less than everyone else and get more than everyone else. Want to make a deal?

A. You’re awesome and we’re impressed by your ability to manage so many accounts! But our other subscribers are also awesome and that wouldn’t be fair to them. So check out our enterprise subscription. You can manage 20 accounts at any time, and you can swap out those accounts each day. So if you have 140 accounts that each want to use Refollow for 1 day each week, well, you do the math…

Q. Something isn’t working for me. WTF?

A. Our brilliant Refollow support team is dying to help you! Given that they’re human and sometimes sleep at night, you might not get a response back within 5 minutes at 3am (we’re in California). But you never know! Just email your problems, suggestions, compliments, and stories to support@refollow.com

Thanks and enjoy! 

-Rob

New subscription plans

Well, we did our best to keep as much of Refollow free as we could based on Twitter’s new limits on us. The only way we would be able to offer everyone all the follow and unfollow requests they would like and still stay within Twitter’s limits would be to buy a huge amount of servers to distribute the requests. But unfortunately we don’t have piles of money lying around here, so we have to pass on a little of that cost to you! 

Here’s what the new subscription plans look like (you can get here by clicking “My Account” after you sign into Refollow):

Free: No follows or unfollows included
Basic: $5.00/mo. - 40 follows and 40 unfollows per day 
Advanced: $10.00/mo. - 150 follows and 150 unfollows per day 
Pro: $20.00/mo. - Unlimited use for 1 account (Note: subject to all limitations and policies imposed by Twitter for your account) 
Business: $50.00/mo. - Unlimited use for 5 accounts 
Enterprise: $150.00/mo. - Unlimited use for 20 accounts 
Non-profit: Free - Unlimited use for 1 account (requires verification of 503C Form) 

To get you started, you’ll get 10 free follow and 10 free unfollow requests after your first time logging into Refollow. And for a limited time, if you help us spread the word, we will give you 10 more follows and unfollows each day! Just follow http://twitter.com/refollow and http://twitter.com/originatelabs , and then send out a Tweet from Refollow mentioning @refollow and we’ll give you some more requests to play with. Obviously it would be much easier for you to just come up with $5/mo. to help support us and save yourself the time (your time is valuable!)

Feel free to send us any suggestions, complaints, compliments, or brilliant ideas… You can email us at support@refollow.com. Happy Refollowing!

Twitter forces us to come up with a business model (how ironic!)

Twitter’s new limit on POST requests from a single IP unfortunately makes it impossible for us to continue offering a free version of Refollow with follow and unfollow capabilities. We are still crunching the numbers on this, but here’s what we’re thinking! 

In order to cover the hosting costs necessary to work around Twitter’s limits, we will offer a membership subscription service with plans ranging from free to personal to enterprise support:

The free version will allow you to use all of the features of Refollow which are not IP rate limited by Twitter (basically everything except follow and unfollow). This includes loading users, filtering, sorting, tagging, and commenting. 

The personal plans (which will range from $5/mo to $20/mo) will allow a single Twitter account a certain number of follows and unfollows per day (or maybe per week). 

The enterprise plans (which will range from $20/mo to $200/mo) will support multiple Twitter accounts and the unlimited use of all features (you are of course always subject to Twitter’s account limits and policies across all Twitter apps). 

We will offer a day or two free trial for new users to try out the full feature set, and we will also offer a discount to education and charity organizations (saving the world is still somewhere on our product roadmap!)

Let us know what you think! We really appreciate all the support and feedback the Refollow community has provided this last year. Please email any thoughts/suggestions to support@refollow.com

And as always, here’s our latest discussion with Twitter support:

———————————————————————-  

From: Brian Sutorius [mailto:bsutorius@twitter.com]
Sent: Monday, October 11, 2010 11:03 AM
To: Rob Meadows
Cc: Brian Truebe; Tyler Buck
Subject: Re: Refollow-up

These kinds of requests are usually subject to site-wide per-account limits on each type of action, which are documented here: http://support.twitter.com/articles/15364 . I’ll also put some of them below:

250 DMs per day

1000 Tweets per day including @replies and retweets, further broken down into semi-hourly sublimits that are not documented (but you can use 1000/24 =~41 tweets per hour as a guideline)

1000 Follows per day

As Taylor mentioned on http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/eed29c3d9efcfad5 we are not sharing some of the other limits, such as unfollows per day per IP. Please let me know if you need anything else.

Brian

On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 7:52 AM, Rob Meadows <rob@originatelabs.com> wrote:

What is the rate limit for POST requests? How many requests can a single ip send per second/minute/whatever?

———————————————————————-  

New Twitter api restrictions will not allow us to support all users anymore :(

We are very disappointed to announce that Twitter’s new api restrictions no longer allow Refollow to support any interesting amount of users. Twitter has apparently now limited the number of follow/unfollow operations a single server can send to them (“rate limits”) rather that limiting it for each user via their api call limits. What this means is that we either need to stop supporting the 500K free users we have using Refollow, or we need to spin up many many servers to distribute the api requests to twitter from multiple places (very very expensive!)

We have asked Twitter support to whitelist Refollow to avoid these restrictions, but it doesn’t look like they are willing. It will be the same amount of requests hitting their servers whether they come from a few servers or a hundred servers, so I’m not really sure what their intent is with this move. 

We are open to any suggestions, but in the meantime, our ip address remains blocked by Twitter and it doesn’t sound like they are interested in Refollow continuing to operate as is. We are throwing around ideas including a read-only version of refollow (no follow/unfollow operations), a subscription version (so we can afford to purchase more servers), or just porting refollow to Facebook! Let us know what you think! http://twitter.com/refollow or support@refollow.com

Here is the latest communication with Twitter support:

————————————————————————-

From: Brian Sutorius [mailto:bsutorius@twitter.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 9:45 AM
To: Rob Meadows
Cc: Brian Truebe; Tyler Buck
Subject: Re: Refollow-up

Yes, I’m sorry this new limit was not announced prior to going into effect. We understand the effect it has on applications like yours and will be more transparent about such changes in the future. 

Brian

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:40 AM, Rob Meadows wrote:

Also, it appears that this new limit was also affecting our users before our ip was blocked:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/eed29c3d9efcfad5?pli=1

It would be nice if we could be notified of changes like this that are going to break our user experience and previous assumptions. We are investing a lot of money in hosting this free service on fast servers so we can provide a great user experience. These types of changes cause us huge cost in terms of debugging and customer support which could easily have been avoided with some discussion or notification ahead of time. 

Thanks,

Rob

 From: Brian Sutorius [mailto:bsutorius@twitter.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 10:07 AM
To: Rob Meadows
Cc: Brian Truebe; Tyler Buck
Subject: Re: Refollow-up 

Whitelisting IPs only affects their rate limit for HTTP GET calls on the REST API, and friendship/create and friendship/destroy calls are both POSTS that are not counted in this rate limit. Additionally, social graph calls are expensive on our end, which is part of the reason we’ve begun to rate limit them separately. 

If load-balancing these requests across multiple servers is not viable, you must at least batch these queries to send them at a steady rate to Twitter and hopefully offload some traffic to off-peak hours. At scale, this of course can cause delays between when the user requests an action and sees the output of this action, but this negative effect on user experience is hopefully better than no service or long outages.

Brian

On Thu, Oct 7, 2010 at 9:57 AM, Rob Meadows wrote:

Is there no way to white-list our ip? Load balancing these requests across more servers would be a significant change to our architecture, and not something that would make sense for us to invest in. In the end, it would result in the same amount of calls to your api’s. We have invested in a few high capacity servers rather than multiple small capacity servers, so this is not a small change you are requesting.

As far as the new ip-based limit, this has the same implication. We would need to spread our requests across many ip’s in order to scale.

We have had a significant increase in the number of users using Refollow over the last few months and have invested in an architecture that will scale. Basically what you are telling me is that Twitter is limiting us on the number of users we can allow to use our service unless we change our architecture completely. Refollow is currently offered for free to your users – no fees, no advertising, etc. The only way we will be able to limit our number of users will be to stop accepting new users or start charging for the service.

From: Brian Sutorius [mailto:bsutorius@twitter.com] 
Sent: Thursday, October 07, 2010 9:25 AM
To: Rob Meadows
Cc: Brian Truebe; Tyler Buck
Subject: Re: Refollow-up 

Hi Rob,

I can confirm that this IP is being blocked on our side for sending an abusive amount of follow calls. These blocks are placed automatically by our anti-abuse systems, and to prevent this going forward, I suggest adding another box or two and load-balancing your traffic so that the social graph calls you send to us are in line with our API rate limits, even if they’re technically not-rate-limited POST calls.

Please let me know when you’ve made these changes or stepped down the rate of these calls and I will remove this IP from our blacklist. I’m sorry for this inconvenience, and can answer any additional questions you may have.

Brian Sutorius

————————————————————————-

Twitter has blocked our ip (again)

For the third time, Twitter has managed to block refollow’s ip (preventing anyone from logging in through OAuth). This has come without notification to us, nor do we have any answers from them yet as to why.

Here’s our request in case you are curious!

—————————————————————————

Dear Twitter:

It appears that Twitter/OAuth is blocking Refollow’s ip address again (184.73.201.196) which has resulted in a day of nobody being able to login. We have received 1000’s of complaints already and we are not sure what to tell people.

Is there a process we should go through to prevent this? We could go and change our IP again like we did the last two times we got blocked, but that doesn’t seem like a good long term solution, and will take a couple days for the dns change to propagate.

Also, it appears that this new limit was also affecting our users before our ip was blocked:

http://groups.google.com/group/twitter-development-talk/browse_thread/thread/eed29c3d9efcfad5?pli=1

 It would be nice if we could be notified of changes like this which are going to break our service. We are investing a lot of money in hosting and maintaining this free product for your users on expensive servers so we can provide a great user experience. These types of changes cause us huge costs in terms of debugging and customer support, which could easily have been avoided with some discussion or notification ahead of time. 

We would really appreciate your support in continuing to provide your users with a reliable, positive experience.

—————————————————————————

Stop getting your Twitter accounts suspended! :)

So Twitter has informed us that the number of accounts getting suspended for using Refollow to aggressively follow is growing. Of course the number of Refollow users is also growing, but who really paid attention in stats class anyway?

But seriously, we don’t want you getting suspended (unless you are one of those annoying spam bots, then at least you don’t have feelings when you get suspended). Twitter asked us to remove the “Select All” and “Select Page” options from Refollow. We’ve explained that we are not comfortable sacrificing the user experience for the majority because of a small percent of users who will just find another way to abuse Twitter with or without Refollow.

So as a compromise, we’ve just removed the “Select All” button (which let you blindly select all users from all pages). You can still do a “Select Page”, which will select the 100 users you can see on the current page. Don’t you think you should at least look at the picture of someone you are about to follow, unfollow, or lock? There are some scary profile pictures out there, and we’re still working on the Hot or Not filter :)

Thanks to all our loyal users and keep refollowing (carefully)!

Good news - OAuth is back!

After some constructive discussions with the Twitter API Support group, Twitter has lifted the suspension and re-enabled OAuth for Refollow. We discussed some valid concerns that Refollow could be used as a tool for spammers to aggressively follow and target users. The challenge is that it’s the same user experience that enables the non-spammers to discover interesting people and help narrow down those they would like to follow or unfollow.

We agreed to add some features to the next release to help limit aggressive following (which will ultimately cause Twitter to suspend an account anyway), and to think about ways to help catch/discourage spammers. Definitely continue to crowd-tag the spammers within Refollow since that’s a great filter to avoid following them by accident. If anyone has other ideas, please share with us via Twitter (@refollow) or email (support@refollow.com)!

Thanks again to Brian and the rest of the Twitter API support group for being proactive and reaching out to work together on a resolution.

We’ve been suspended by Twitter :(

Despite our best efforts to reach out to Twitter to clarify what they are asking us to change about Refollow (which went ignored by them), Twitter has decided to suspend Refollow. This means you can no longer use OAuth to login (but for now, basic Twitter authentication still works).

We assume Twitter knows what is best for their overall ecosystem, but we certainly question what exactly that vision is. Without the ability to discover the nature of your relationships with others (or potential new relationships) and take actions, what’s the point?

We will continue to reach out to Twitter support and see if we can get a dialog going, but in case that fails, thank you to all 100,000+ of you that regularly use Refollow! Feel free to keep on Refollowing until Twitter figures out how to block basic authentication as well :) Guess it’s time to start the port to Facebook!

In case anyone is interested, here are the emails we exchanged with Twitter support:

From Twitter Support:

From: sutorius [mailto:notifications-support@twitter.zendesk.com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 10:01 AM
To: Support
Subject: #827777 Twitter Support: update on “Your site Refollow.com”

Support, Jan 19 10:01 am (PST):

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know that your site, Refollow, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates automated bulk user following and unfollowing, which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes to bring your application into compliance.

We’ll check back in on your application on Monday, February 1st. If these changes aren’t made by then, we may take action against it. Thank you in advance for your cooperation.

Let us know if you have any questions!
Brian
Twitter API Support

Our reply:

From: Rob Meadows
Sent: Tuesday, January 19, 2010 11:33 AM
To: ‘Twitter Support’
Cc: Tyler Buck; Jeremy Miller
Subject: RE: #827777 Twitter Support: update on “Your site Refollow.com”

Hello,    Can we please setup a time to discuss the specifics of this request? Refollow does not automate following or unfollowing any more than the Twitter web interface itself. Users must still go through and select other users to take action on, then manually choose to follow/unfollow the selected users. The only enhancement Refollow provides beyond following/unfollowing each user individually is that it optimizes the use of your api calls to follow/unfollow in groups of 20. But users must still select specific users after filtering and examining them.    Refollow is designed to help users discover things about their twitter social relationships (such as users who have become inactive, users who are interested in certain things, users who are most influential, etc.) and perform actions on these users such as following/unfollowing/blocking/tweeting. The application is not intended for the purpose of spamming, aggressive following, building followers, etc., nor does the application encourage such actions.    Please let us know the next steps.   Thanks,
Rob  

Rob Meadows
CEO Originate Labs
www.originatelabs.com

Guess not…:

From: sutorius [mailto:notifications-support@twitter.zendesk.com]
Sent: Monday, February 01, 2010 11:18 AM
To: Support
Subject: #845863 Twitter Support: update on “Your site Refollow.com”
Support, Feb 01 11:17 am (PST):

Hi,

This is a second notice that your application, ReFollow, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates bulk user following and unfollowing, neither of which are allowed. Please remove these features from your application to bring it into compliance with our policies by next Monday, February 8th. If you are unable to meet this deadline, your application may be prohibited from functioning on Twitter.

Thank you in advance,
Brian
Twitter API Support