Not too long ago we announced that you can now write and schedule blog posts with SocialOomph.

We have now expanded that feature with “RSS to blog”.

What that means is you can now grab one or more (in fact as many as you like) RSS feeds and automatically create blog post entries from the RSS feed entries.

At the same time, you can also publish updates to social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) using those same entries on the RSS feed.

With SocialOomph it is now possible to populate your blog with hand-crafted scheduled blog posts, combined with posts that are created from external RSS feeds.

We use our existing Blog Feed feature for RSS To Blog, which means you can filter the RSS feed entries and only create a new blog post from them when they include certain keywords in the text.

RSS To Blog is a SocialOomph Professional feature.

You access it by:

1. Adding your blog to your SocialOomph account.
2. Adding a Blog Feed account, and selecting your blog (and other accounts) as the target for the Blog Feed.

One Blog Feed can feed as many blogs and social networking accounts as you want, and you can feed as many Blog Feeds into one blog and/or social networking account as you want.

The user profile or bio area that you have available on your Twitter account is very short and very limited. You can add a bit of text and one URL.

With our extended Twitter profiles you can:

• Create a detailed profile with a lots of text.
• Include as many hyperlinks in your extended profile as you want.
• Format the extended profile with HTML tags in exactly the way you want.
• Use a very easy WYSIWYG editor to write and format your extended profile.

The extended profile is hosted on our system, and we will automatically show your Twitter background on your extended profile, which means your visitor has a seamless experience between your Twitter account and your extended profile.

Your extended profile is linked to from the Web (or Twitter profile) URL that is available on your Twitter account.

The extended profile is linked to with either a long URL, or a shortened URL, according to your choice. If you have updated your SocialOomph account with your authenticated bit.ly account, then we create the short URL using your bit.ly account, which means you can track clicks to your extended profile.

You can also enable or disable user comments on your extended profile.

For an example, click the “Web” URL in our @SocialOomph Twitter account profile, or go directly to our extended social profile. You can have one just like it that you write yourself and that is styled in accordance with your Twitter account styling.

This new feature is gratis. It’s part of our free service offering and everyone can enjoy it.

Getting your own extended social profile is super easy:

1. Register a free account on SocialOomph.com.
2. Add your Twitter account to your SocialOomph account.
3. Select “Social Accounts, Extended Profiles” from the menu and write your free profile.

We further increased the already rich feature set of SocialOomph and your value for money.

You can now add blogs to your portfolio of social accounts in your SocialOomph account, and schedule feature-rich blog posts for those blogs.

It is now a snap to fully integrate your social information distribution activities from one central platform, namely SocialOomph.

Schedule your tweets, Facebook (profile and page) updates, and blog posts all in one go. See in one glance how they all fit into an integrated timeline. And automatically update your Twitter and Facebook accounts when a new blog post is published with our existing Blog Feed feature.

You can add many types of blogs.

WordPress (hosted on wordpress.com and self-hosted), Blogger, Tumblr, Drupal, Joomla! and more.

In fact, as long as your blog has one of the following remote publishing APIs, you can schedule posts for it: WordPress API, metaWeblog API, Movable Type API, Blogger API, and Atom API.

You can add and manage as many blogs as you want in your one SocialOomph account.

The blogging feature is available to SocialOomph Professional users, and is included in the existing low monthly fee.

We realize this is a major new feature, so we have reset the free trial on everyone’s accounts. You can now again take the 7-day trial of Professional, even if you have already done so in the past. We have also extended existing running trials by an additional 5 days.

We have great news for you if you want to schedule updates for your Facebook account.

You can now add your Facebook account into your list of accounts in SocialOomph, and schedule status updates that will be published at the dates and times of your choosing.

In addition, you can also add any Facebook Page of which you are an Administrator, and schedule Wall posts for it.

We use Facebook’s secure Connect technology to connect to your Facebook account, which means you never need to give us your login credentials.

To access the new Facebook integration, login to your SocialOomph account, and click Accounts, Add Account in the menu.

Facebook integration is available to SocialOomph Professional users, and is included in the low monthly subscription fee (no raising of fees here).

If you have not already done so, take the completely free 7-day trial of Professional today and check it out for yourself.

The Lists feature of Twitter is an excellent way of organizing your friends and followers, and we have integrated the building and maintenance of lists into SocialOomph to give you even more power and convenience.

For Free and Professional Users

When you vet your new followers, you can also select the Twitter list to which a follower must be added for each follower that you approve. This functionality is only available if you’ve turned on new follower vetting on your Twitter account entry.

For Professional Users Only

As you probably know, with Friend Finder you can find potential new friends who tweet about keywords of your choice.

With our Twitter Lists integration, you can instruct the system to add new friends (after they’ve been approved) to a list of your choice.

You can connect a Twitter list to one specific keyword, or to several keywords.

For example, you could define a keyword of “@yourusername” (which will find people who mention you) and create a private list called “Mentioned Me”, which you connect to that keyword. Friend Finder will then add (after approval) the people who mention you to your Mentioned Me list.

We will maintain the list for you and automatically rotate the oldest entries out when the list reaches its maximum size of 500 Twitter users (you can also specify a smaller list size that we should maintain). In other words, your list will always contain the latest 500 (or a smaller size of your choice) friends that were found and approved by Friend Finder.

Nothing prevents you from manually adding Twitter users to the same lists in your Twitter web interface. Our system will not touch those entries in the list when the list reaches its maximum size. We rotate out only entries that were added to the list by Friend Finder.

As always, this Professional feature is included in the low monthly subscription fee.

On Monday, October 12th, 2009, Twitter communicated to us that recurring tweets are in violation of their Terms of Service. Twitter’s rationale centered around the potential for recurring tweets to result in duplicate tweets.

The content of the communication is extracted for your benefit below:

Recurring Tweets are a violation no matter how they are done, including whether or not someone pays you to have a special privilege. We don’t want to see any duplicate tweets whatsoever- They pollute Twitter, and tools shouldn’t be given to enable people to break the rules. Spinnable text seems to just be a way to bypass the rules against duplicate updates and essentially provides the same problems.

Hence, from Thursday, October 15th, 2009, 00:00 AM CST we will prevent are preventing the entry of recurring tweets on Twitter accounts within the SocialOomph system. Existing recurring tweets on Twitter accounts will all be placed have all been placed in paused state at that time, so that the content of the tweet text is still accessible to you, but no publishing to Twitter of those tweets will take is taking place.

Recurring tweets scheduled for other social services are not affected by this change. Other scheduled tweets are also not affected by this change.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, but it is important to us to keep our system in good standing with Twitter.

On Sunday, October 4th, 2009, we changed the IP address of SocialOomph.com.

For a brief period you will get a 404 error.

The new IP address takes a while to propagate to all the DNS servers across the Internet.

If it has been a day or more since Sunday and you are still seeing the 404 page, please clear your browser cache and cookies, and refresh the DNS cache on your local computer. You may also want to contact your ISP and ask them why their DNS server has not yet picked up the new IP address.

Rest assured, SocialOomph is up and running, and all automation is also working.

If you have a few hundred or a few thousand followers, you will know how difficult it is to identify people from that list whom you would perhaps like to develop a better relationship with. It is a very laborious exercise to say the least.

Now we have made it extremely easy for you to do just that.

We call the new feature, “Followers With Clout”.

It analyzes all your followers and figures out who of them have the most people following them. In other words, we identify the folks who follow you who have the widest reach and audience for the tweets that they write.

You think it will benefit you if you could develop a working relationship with those folks, and have them tweet about you or your business to their followers? Of course it will.

Remember, these people are already following you. They have already expressed an interest in what you have to say. In addition, since they are following you, you can communicate with them in private via direct messages (just make sure you’re following them back before sending them a DM).

To access the Followers With Clout feature, login to your SocialOomph account, and click Followers, Clout in the menu.

It is available to SociaOomph Professional users and to people doing the Free Trial of Professional. As always, this new feature is included in the current subscription price of Professional.

When you’re following a substantial number of friends, it becomes near impossible to focus in on tweets that come from a subset of your friends. Those tweets are merged with the rest and you have to hunt for them, and worse, you may miss some if you don’t page back far enough.

We have now solved that problem for you with SocialOomph Channels.

With Channels, you can group Twitter users and view only those tweets that come from those users in a “mini” or “segmented” tweet stream. In other words, all the other tweets in your stream magically disappear, leaving only the tweets from those users that you have included in a channel.

It’s suddenly super easy to focus in on a few friends, or isolate tweets from users that tweet about a specific topic that interests you.

What’s more, you don’t even need to follow a Twitter user to include that account in a channel. That’s right, you can build a channel of Twitter users whom you follow and whom you don’t follow, all in the same channel.

In short:

1. You can group Twitter users into a “channel” and we will show you their tweets, sorted from the newest to the oldest;
2. You do not have to follow any of the Twitter users that you include in your channels; and
3. You can define an unlimited number of Channels, meaning you can build as many private and segmented tweet streams as you wish.

Do we hear, “spying on the competition without following them?”

The ability to define custom channels is available to SocialOomph Professional users, and is included in the low monthly subscription fee.

We have not forgotten about our Free users. We’ve defined a number of system channels that you can view at your leisure, and see what the celebrities, musicians, and politicians are tweeting. Plus, you get breaking news from several sources, and if bargain shopping is your thing, there’s even a free channel that gives you savings and deals alerts from several sources.

To access Channels, login to SocialOomph.com, and click Monitors, Channels in the menu.

On Tuesday morning, September 1st, 2009, our site went down from being overloaded by spammers who ran multiple automated scripts against the site to add thousands of Twitter accounts and hundreds of thousands of spam tweets.

To prevent this from happening again, we implemented reCAPTCHA on the forms that add a new account and add a new scheduled tweet.

That is the only way to effectively block automated scripts from abusing those forms.

We have had requests from users to remove the CAPTCHA from those forms and implement it only on the login form. Unfortunately that will not help. With CAPTCHA only on the login form, spammers can still run their scripts. All they have to do is let the script present them with the CAPTCHA at login, and then they are off to the races and can let their script run against the other forms as before.

Blocking of IP addresses also does not work, because the spammers simply hop from one IP address to the next using proxy servers.

We realize this is an inconvenience. But, in the end it is just one additional form field that must be completed, and it adds a few seconds to the completion of the form. We trust that folks will understand the necessity.

The benefits are that the system performance and system uptime are better for everyone, and our service’s standing with Twitter is not jeopardized by the gazillion of spam tweets that the spammers want to push through our service to Twitter.

Professional users are not presented with the reCAPTCHA challenge on the new tweet form for two reasons, namely: a) spammers rarely want to reveal their true identities via PayPal payments, and b) Professional users have access to the bulk file upload feature that makes running scripts unnecessary for adding a lot of tweets.

Update - Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 2:30 PM EST: We have listened to you and have now modified the CAPTCHA challenge on the new tweet form to appear only occasionally. We trust that this will bring balance between site security and usability.

From Monday, August 31st, 2009, TweetLater.com will be no more and will be known as SocialOomph.com.

The transition to the new name takes place over the weekend of August 29th and 30th.

Why The Change?

To date we have been focusing on providing productivity solutions for Twitter users. We decided to change our name to allow for future expansion into other social media solutions, and to ensure that our brand does not conflict with any current or future legal rights of the Twitter organization.

To allay any speculation, we want to make clear that this is an unsolicited, proactive and preemptive action on our side.

What Do You Need To Do?

TweetLater Users

To ensure that you enjoy an uninterrupted service, please do the following:

1. In your email program or service, white-list the email address emailservice@socialoomph.com. This will ensure that you continue to receive your keyword alerts, and other email communication from us.
2. In your browser, update your bookmarks to point to http://www.socialoomph.com. This is for your convenience only. After the transition, all traffic to tweetlater.com will be automatically redirected to socialoomph.com.
3. If you are using a Status Feed, change “tweetlater” to “socialoomph” in the URL after August 31st. We will also automatically redirect your links to feeds.socialoomph.com.
4. Your login credentials and the content of your account remain the same. No need to do or change anything.
5. Look forward to new and exciting additions to our service!

TweetLater Professional Users

Apart from the recommended actions above, you do not need to change anything. Your subscription and your payments are not affected by this change.

TweetLater Affiliates

Your affiliate links to TweetLater.com will continue to work and track into the future. We will automatically redirect your links to SocialOomph.com. Your commissions are also unaffected.

Nevertheless, to avoid confusion in the marketplace, please do the following as soon as possible after August 31st:

1. Update your affiliate links. You will need to change “tweetlater” to “socialoomph” in your links. The rest of the URL remains the same.
2. Update the text of your promotional material to refer to SocialOomph instead of TweetLater.
3. If you are using our banner graphics, we will replace the banner graphics with new ones that promote SocialOomph instead of TweetLater. The change-over should be seamless for you.

TweetLater API Users

After August 31st, please change “tweetlater” to “socialoomph” in your API call links. We will also automatically redirect any calls tweetlaterapi.com to socialoomphapi.com well into the future.

A New Future

We are very excited about this change because it broadens our scope from providing you with productivity solutions for Twitter to providing you with productivity solutions for all your social media activities.

For you and for us this represents a giant leap forward, which will stack even more benefits on top of those that you are already enjoying.

Add some OOMPH to your social media activities!

For a second weekend in a row, Twitter has put up defenses against a denial-of-service attack that also block all legitimate high-volume API calls from third-party applications such as TweetLater.

This issue started on Saturday afternoon (August 15th), and has been ongoing since then with very little support from Twitter and no communication about it on any of their status sites.

Please monitor the service notice that is posted above the blue menu tabs on TweetLater.com, which you will see after you have logged in to your account.

We will also publish updates here until the issue is resolved.

Update, Monday, August 17th, 1:39 PM EST: At 1:39 PM EST (10:39 AM PST) we started seeing activity from the Twitter engineers, saying that they were beginning to look into the issue.

Update, Monday, August 17th, 5:42 PM EST: Unfortunately, there is still no indication from Twitter regarding a timeframe for them solving the issue. Several other applications are affected by the same issue and other API issues at present. Some are rendered completely inoperative, while others can only limp along at best.

Update, Monday, August 17th, 8:15 PM EST: We have now enabled all Twitter automation. The Twitter API appears to be functional again.

Early on Thursday morning Twitter suffered a denial-of-service attack.

As part of their defense against the attack, they blocked a large number IP addresses, including, we presume IP addresses that were making high-volume calls to their API.

TweetLater’s IP addresses were also blocked in the process, since we normally make more than 40 API calls per second in the normal course of our business.

TweetLater was not part of the denial-of-service attack. We were simply caught up as innocent bystanders in Twitter’s defense against the actual attackers.

As part of the recovery from the attack, Twitter is unblocking the white-listed IP addresses of third-party applications such as TweetLater.

This unblocking process is a meticulous one and there are many IP addresses to unblock (not only TweetLater’s). According to Twitter engineers, the process can last well into Saturday.

We do not know exactly when the actual unblocking of TweetLater’s IP addresses will occur, but we do know they will be unblocked.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.

Normal service will resume as soon as the IP addresses have been unblocked.

Free trials of TweetLater Professional will be extended by a few days once normal service resumes.

Update: This thread on the Twitter Developer Talk Group shows that many other third-party applications were also blocked.

Update Thursday, 8:25 PM EST: We have now restored normal operations. We have also extended all active free trials of TweetLater Professional by one day.

Update Thursday, 8:38 PM EST: We spoke too soon. Sorry. Services have been paused again. Twitter is not out of the woods yet.

Update Friday, 12:24 PM EST: Some features of the online website have been restored. All automation processes are still in paused mode, because the Twitter API is still refusing to process any high-volume API requests.

Update Friday, 10:38 PM EST: There has been no change yet. The Twitter API is still refusing to process any type of volume API requests. Twitter has communicated that the denial-of-service attacks have been ongoing and have intensified on Friday, and that they believe those attacks are geopolitical in motivation. Twitter is still defending against the attacks, and has asked everyone to hang in there with them.

Update Saturday, 00:19 AM EST: The latest update from Twitter is that there is no, we repeat, no ETA on when these issues will be resolved.

Update Saturday, 8:12 AM EST: The status has not yet changed. The TweetLater web site is operational, but all Twitter automation is still paused. Blog feeds and Ping.fm automation are processing as usual. Please login to TweetLater and read the service announcement above the blue menu tabs for more details on what is paused and what is running normally.

Update Saturday, 5:44 PM EST: There has been complete and deathly silence from Twitter today. No communication about the status to application developers. We have cautiously turned on the process that publishes scheduled tweets to Twitter. There may be periods where it may be blocked, during which it will revert back to putting tweets that are older than two hours into an error condition. But, so far so good…

Update Saturday, 6:00 PM EST: Nope… As soon as you send even a small volume to the API their edge defenses simply block your IP address. It is high time that Twitter identifies who are their friends, and allow them to operate normally while defending against the bad guys. They already white-list our IP addresses, so they know exactly which IP addresses are approved ones that should be allowed to work normally.

Update Sunday, 10:55 AM EST: The status has not yet changed. All developers of third-party applications are still waiting for an update by Twitter regarding correction of the severe limitations currently imposed by the Twitter API. The last time Twitter has provided any meaningful update was on Friday.

Update Sunday, 1:54 PM EST: The status is still the same. Twitter has published an update saying that the attacks are still ongoing, and that they are still working on restoring normal access to the Twitter API. There still is no timeframe for the resolution of this issue.

Update Sunday, 4:29 PM EST: The Twitter API has now been opened for volume transactions. It appears that the issue has been resolved, and we have resumed normal operations. Existing free trials of TweetLater Professional have been extended by three additional days. Thank you for the patience and support that you have shown.

Credit goes to Joshua’s comment on the previous post for sparking the idea of writing this brief article. Joshua said:

The only way to follow more people is to increase your account followers. But, what can you do in order to increase your followers if you are stuck at one of the Twitter thresholds without dumping a lot of people who aren’t following you? Why don’t you write up a follow on article with that as the focus? I would love to know your thoughts…

The question, “How do I increase my followers if I am stuck at one of Twitter’s following limits,” assumes that the only, or the best way to gain more followers is through following more people yourself.

That is an incorrect assumption. It is a pity that some folks are teaching others that this is the way to gain more followers, because it completely distorts what Twitter is about.

Twitter is a social platform, and by definition, social means interaction.

So, here is the free and guaranteed process to gain more followers on Twitter.

1. Participate in the conversation.

That means, actually read what others (those whom you are following) are saying, and compliment, add to, or comment on what they are saying.

Your purpose for getting more followers is so that they will read what you tweet, correct?

So why on earth would you expect them to read what you tweet, if you are not willing to read what others tweet?

If everyone just wanted others to read what they tweeted, Twitter will morph into one massive megaphone where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening.

2. Induce others to compliment, add to, or comment on what YOU are saying.

You will never accomplish this if all you do is tweet your teeth whitening affiliate links.

You can only do this by thoughtful and helpful tweets, in other words, tweets that make other people feel good, tweets that they find interesting, and tweets that they find helpful.

This step is absolutely required because…

People voluntarily follow others whom they find interesting.

But, not only do they voluntarily follow you, they also voluntarily reply to you and voluntarily retweet your tweets.

And that is where the viral power of Twitter kicks in!

Every time that they reply to you, THEIR followers get to see your Twitter username, and every time they retweet you, their followers get to see your Twitter username and your tweet.

Most people are curious and will check out your profile, if they notice that someone they are following is finding you interesting. And if they like your profile, they will follow you.

Now, does this mean you need to be glued to your Twitter web interface 24 x 7? Absolutely not. You must be physically present for Step #1, participating in the conversation. But, for Step #2 you can easily use the tweet scheduling feature of TweetLater to compose your tweets, and post them even when you cannot be physically in front of your computer. Most people do not appreciate it when one person dominates their Twitter stream with a barrage of tweets. You can use our free scheduling engine to spread out your gems throughout the day.

It is not how you publish your tweet that matters, it is what you say in your tweet that matters. Great content will get reaction, and useless content will silently disappear into electronic oblivion, regardless of how you got it into your Twitter timeline.

Lastly, if your idea of interesting is the posting of quotes, please pry that idea loose and cast it into the outer regions of the universe. Quotes are completely overused on Twitter. Besides, people do not want to hear from Einstein, Twain, or Confucius.

People want to hear from YOU. That is why they followed you in the first place.

Best regards,

Dewald Pretorius
Owner of TweetLater.com

A feature that many of our users request is the ability to bulk unfollow friends. We want to clarify here why you should not do it on your Twitter account, and why we do not offer that feature.

The rationale for the feature usually goes like this:

I want to follow a number of people and wait a few days to see who follow me back. Then I want to get rid of those who didn’t. This way I can remain within the Twitter following limits while still being able to follow new people. Then, each time I can wait for them to follow me back, bulk unfollow those who didn’t, and rinse and repeat. This is a great way to build a follower list.

Service X and service Y are doing it, so why can’t you guys also add it? It will be really nice, and if you add it I will definitely upgrade to Professional. Thanks.

It sounds like a reasonable request, doesn’t it? Except, there’s one problem with it.

Twitter hates it and calls it “following churn”.

In the Twitter rules they do reference following churn as an undesirable activity, but it is only on their Business for Twitter site that they more clearly reveal how they define following churn.

We quote:

To make sure you’re not spamming folks, we also suggest you avoid the following:

Following churn: Following and unfollowing the same people repeatedly, as well as following and unfollowing those who don’t follow back, are both violations of our terms of service.

In other words, Twitter will suspend your account if you do bulk unfollow.

There’s no “safe” way to do bulk unfollow. It’s like an on-off switch. Either you do bulk unfollow or you don’t. And if you do, you will get into trouble.

That’s the reason why we have not added bulk unfollow as a feature to TweetLater, and why we believe you should not do it on your Twitter account.

Something a lot of folks asked for in TweetLater is the ability to search for people to follow based on keywords.

We’ve listened to your requests and have now built in that feature.

For each of your Twitter accounts, you can specify a range of keywords. We search for Twitter users who have recently published tweets that contain those keywords.

But, we don’t stop there. We know that many spammy accounts, which you wouldn’t want to follow, might also tweet about those keywords.

So, we’ve given you the ability to automatically filter the Twitter profiles and ignore the spammy ones.

You can filter based on the following:

• Keywords and text snippets contained in the profile bio, latest tweet, and Twitter username.
• The age of the Twitter account.
• Number of tweets.
• Following-to-follower ratio.
• Number of followers.
• Number of friends.
• The language of the tweets.
• Whether or not other TweetLater users have marked as spam or blocked the Twitter user.

We take those Twitter users who pass through your filters and place them on a queue where you can cast a human eye over them and make the final decision whether you want to follow them or not. (You can also tell the system to skip this review step and auto-follow those profiles).

Furthermore, you can pause and unpause the TweetLater Friend Finder at your discretion, and you can even tell it to automatically pause when it has found a certain number of potential friends, or when your own following-to-follower ratio exceeds a certain percentage.

It’s power at your disposal to follow quality Twitter users while you remain 100% in control. And in the process we save you the hundreds of hours you would have spent to achieve the same results.

Keyword following is available to TweetLater Professional users and, as always, this new feature is included in the low monthly subscription fee.

If you are a Professional user, you already have access to and will find the TweetLater Friend Finder keyword following under the Followers item in the menu.

If you have not yet taken up the 7-day free trial of Professional, then now is a great time to do so.

Now you can say buh-bye to spammers!

Sunday, July 26th, 2009 marks an important milestone in the development and growth of TweetLater.com.

At around 2:00 PM EST our number of users went past the 100,000 mark.

Many thanks to all our wonderful users who have made this possible.

It is our honor and privilege that you have chosen us to improve your productivity on Twitter.

Sunday, July 5th, 2009: A lot of people with legitimate Twitter accounts are currently suffering from having their accounts suspended (late Sunday afternoon).

It is not TweetLater’s doing or fault. So, please do not submit a TweetLater support request about it.

We just heard back from Twitter via email, and they said : “Spamcloud hit. We’re working on restoring accounts.”

We just need to be patient. The suspended accounts will be restored.

Update: We have no idea exactly what a “spam cloud” means. It is probably Twitter staff lingo for a massive spam attack.

Update: We have seen during previous spam attacks that Twitter tends to shoot first and ask questions later and indiscriminately lay down carpet bombing when their system comes under a spam attack. A lot of innocent-bystander accounts get massacred in the process, which they then have to restore afterwards. This is most likely what has happened again.

Update: We have no idea how long it will take Twitter to restore the wrongly suspended accounts. We do not have insight into that information.

Update: Twitter has now posted an update about the suspensions on their status blog.

Earlier today, we accidentally suspended a number of accounts.

We regret the human error that led to these mistaken suspensions and we are working to restore the affected accounts—we expect this to be completed in the next several hours.

One additional note: some the accounts suspended were using the third-party site Tweetlater. However, Tweetlater is not to blame for these suspensions nor is it in violation of our Terms.

Update: It appears that the issue has now been resolved and most suspended accounts have been restored. If your account is still suspended, please submit a support request at http://help.twitter.com and ask them to look at your account.

Post-Mortem by Dewald Pretorius, Owner of TweetLater.com

It is a real pity, but probably unavoidable, that some people have a tendency to jump to premature conclusions. A lot of folks almost immediately blamed TweetLater for the suspensions, and some even canceled their TweetLater accounts.

The reason why many TweetLater users were affected was very simple. We service a very large number of Twitter accounts. At time of writing that number exceeded 100,000 Twitter accounts. If Twitter makes a mistake that affects a large number of accounts, then naturally a large number of TweetLater users will be affected by the mistake.

I work very hard to maintain an excellent working relationship with Alex Payne, Matt Sanford, and Doug Williams of the Twitter API team, and with Del Harvey of the Twitter Spam team. They are always very responsive, professional, and helpful whenever I approach them.

And, I work equally hard to ensure, with the help and advice of the Twitter folks mentioned above, that TweetLater features always remain within the Twitter Terms and never does anything that Twitter frowns upon. TweetLater is my bread and butter, the thing that pays my mortgage. Hence, being a good neighbor of Twitter is absolutely essential, no, it is absolutely non-negotiable to me. I regularly turn down feature requests and offers of large additional payments for some new features, which I know will not sit well with Twitter and potentially jeopardize my service’s standing with Twitter.

The lesson from this is as follows: Things are often much simpler and far more benign than what some people want to believe. Perhaps it’s because conspiracy theories are more interesting, or more sensational, that people want to believe them rather than just the simple mundane truth. I don’t know.

It’s just very frustrating to watch your service, your passion, come under attack when you have done nothing wrong.

Nevertheless, there is also an upside to this matter, and I will conclude with it and close this post on a positive note.

This issue has created an enormous amount of free publicity for TweetLater, which makes me very happy.

Twitter implemented an API change on July 1st, 2009 so that all tweets originating via the API now have “from API” in the source display area of the Twitter timelines.

Previously the source area said “from web” when the originating application did not supply a source parameter when it publishes the tweet.

For the time being, TweetLater will continue to not provide a source parameter, which means your scheduled tweets will all have “from API” in the source display area.

We may evaluate this matter at a later date and decide if we should send a source parameter so that the tweets have “from TweetLater” in the source area.

Your feedback in the comments will be appreciated.

Update: Just want to clarify the following:

1. This was a change that Twitter unilaterally implemented on their side.
2. We cannot manipulate or change the source display. There are only two choices namely “from API” or “from TweetLater”. If we continue to not supply a source parameter, the tweets will continue to say “from API”.
3. We cannot go back to “from web” because Twitter does not allow that. From July 1 the only tweets that say “from web” are those that were manually entered in the web interface of Twitter.com.
4. It is not only TweetLater that is affected by this. The tweets from all third-party applications that don’t supply a source parameter now say “from API”.
5. Chances are that we will leave it as is, i.e., as saying “from API” for TweetLater. Our service is fortunately large enough, popular enough, and receive sufficient word-of-mouth exposure that we have no need to use the source display as an advertisement for TweetLater.

Update: This comment from Ryan deserves highlighting here in the post body: “If you are providing your followers with something valuable they won’t care where the tweets are coming from.” So true, Ryan! When we change over to the OAuth authentication method of Twitter, we may not have a choice anymore in terms of the source label. Our understanding is that when an application uses OAuth, all tweets from that application are automatically labeled with the name of that application. We will be changing over to OAuth as soon as Twitter takes their OAuth authentication out of beta testing. To be clear, changing to OAuth is not optional for a Twitter application. Twitter is going to deprecate the username/password authentication method.

Nobody needs to tell you that direct message SPAM is ever increasing on Twitter. Just try and wade through your DM inbox on some days.

We have just launched our brand-new integrated Direct Message Manager, where you can manage the DMs of all your Twitter accounts on one single page, in one integrated view.

From that page you can DM the senders, unfollow or block them, forward the DM to someone else, and more.

But even more powerful are the SPAM rules that you can define. The system will apply your rules every time you open or refresh your Direct Message Manager, and get rid of any unwanted DMs.

You can tell the system to just delete a DM when you mark it as SPAM, or delete it and unfollow the person, or delete it and block the person, etc.

Furthermore, you can also enter keyphrases that we must monitor. If someone sends you a DM that contains one of those keyphrases, we will automatically apply your SPAM rules to that DM.

In addition, you can also tell the system to look at what other TweetLater users think of person who sent you a DM. If someone else has already marked it as SPAM, you can tell us to automatically mark it as SPAM on all your Twitter accounts as well.

The Direct Message Manager is available to TweetLater Professional users (and those on the free trial of TweetLater Professional).

In keeping with our commitment, this powerful new feature comes at no additional charge.

You can access the Direct Message Manager by logging in to your TweetLater account, clicking the DMs menu tab, and then the DM Manager sub-menu tab.