December 9, 2008

SocialToo is the another entry to the Twitter Economy series. Since it’s a direct Qwitter competitor, it naturally follows the first entry that was dedicated to this service.

What’s SocialToo anyway

SocialToo is working to compliment your social experience by providing you with all the tools you need to get the most you can from those you follow on the web. We’re automating the processes needed to make this experience as easy as possible, and providing you with tools to reach your audience to its fullest potential.

is how the founders describe it on the main page.

The tool allows you to manage your Twitter relationship to a certain extent. As Qwitter, you receive an email with the users that have stopped following you. However, it also adds the people that have started following you and this in the form of a daily e-mail (and not a push e-mail like Qwitter does).

SocialToo also offers you a widely used tool: the auto-follow. You can actually decide to automate the courtesy of following every person that starts following you, sending the person a direct message of your choice along the way (I use it to thank the user and give the URL of my blog).

SocialToo is intelligent enough to also offer you the possibility of auto-unfollow, in case a person decides not to read your micro-blog entries anymore.

It goes even further, as you’re offered the possibility of actually blacklisting those users/stalkers you don’t want to read about anymore.

SocialToo can also be used to create small surveys that are sent to Twitter.

Interestingly enough, your username.socialtoo.com can redirect to your Facebook profile.

As a bonus, SocialToo not only works with Twitter but also with the less-adopted open-source micro-blogging tool, Identi.ca

Useful?

The fact that SocialToo’s surveys appear more and more in the Twitter chatter means that the tool is becoming widely used. Not bad for a company that started this venture on Nov. 08.

Haven’t seen one that was answered by a large enough number of people to be scientifically useful, but that’s a start. A great idea is to have included a RSS feed to the surveys, for easy follow-up.

With some email parsing, as with Qwitter, one could create trends in his follows/unfollows.

Not everyone is a fan of this auto-follow method, since it might add a lot of noise-to-signal (having to follow a lot of people just adds to the chatter). However, with emerging tools like TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr and others that allow you to clean the chatter, the auto-follow could become part of the Twittetiquette of the future.

All in all, I find this service very useful. It could grow to much better things in the future.

Business model

The company was created by Jesse Stay and Guy Kawazaki, of AllTop fame. Ownership is split between Stay N Alive and Guy. Garage.com has partnered to launch the latest updates on SocialToo, but it is unclear if the venture capital company is financially involved at this point.

No clear business model is in place, as with many companies burgeoning in the Twitter Economy. I remain however bullish on its capacity to monetize its head-start in the coming months, provided the company finds clever way of integrating ads or creating actual statistics that could be very useful to marketers and entrepreneurs using Twitter.

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