Twitter by Email with Topify

Twitter has a few shortcomings, such as sending terse follow messages and no way to reply to DMs via email. Topify.com makes such features a reality. Read on for your free invite to Topify.

I first heard about Topify from Zee on thenextweb. He described Topify as “the most useful Twitter app I am ever likely to use”. How could I resist?

I visited the site and requested beta invite, the usual first point of call for web 2.1 sites. They usually either come by return mail or take days (because companies like to keep a lid on server usage). Meanwhile, I asked fellow tweeps what they thought about Topify’s security. After all, you have to give it your password for it to work its magic. There were a few positive replies and another from a known contact who knows and trusts personally one of Topify’s co-founders. That was good enough for me and also offered a quicker in.

I tweeted the co-founder and had my invite within moments and was setting up my Topify account. Topify asks for an email address and your Twitter login. I entered those and it presents you with an auto-generated email.

Next, you login into Twitter, go to your settings and change your usual email for the Topify-generated email. At this point, you have to take it on trust that Topify has a more sustainable business model than simply scraping twitter passwords.

Once you’re setup, you will begin to see some major and very useful changes to the way Twitter email announcements work. Next time someone follows you, the message you receive from twitter (assuming you have such emails enabled) will include that tweep’s Bio in the message as well as their follow/unfollow numbers and how long they have been on Twitter.

All this extra information (as you can see from the screengrab above) is readily available on Twitter itself, but it’s very useful to see it in the follow email as you can then decide whether that tweep is worth following and then follow them by replying to the email! No need to log back into Twitter every time to follow someone who just followed you.

Incidentally, this single feature was already available to users of Twimailer.com, but there’s more to Topify it has another great feature that knocks the current version of Twimailer for six.

The second great feature is that when you receive a direct message (DM) notification you can read and reply to it from your email program, again without having to visit Twitter. Coming soon…”block” unwanted followers via reply too.

As I mentioned before, I was naturally wary of handing over my twitter details and email to a third party. It is simply creating a routing email that you then add to your Twitter account separately.

Topify co-found Arik Fraimovich explains: “The email address you get from us forwards all the received notifications to your current mail account. We only serve as a pipe.”

I also asked Zee what he thought:

Frankly, you’re in their 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.

As a point of interest and testament to how helpful Arik and Ouriel Ohayon hope to be in providing this service, he responded within minutes to my password feedback. It seems that when I registered I’d inadvertently entered an incorrect twitter password. Arik helped me reset my account, but went one step further and has now modified the Topify registration process so that it validates your Twitter email at the time of registration.

Click here to join Topify, this is an invite link just for the first ten Sciencetext subscribers