We’ve released the first round of Google Buzz integration in SocialOomph.

You can now schedule Buzz posts in exactly the same way that you can schedule Twitter tweets and Facebook updates.

In addition, your Buzz posts can have attached links to external sites and pages, as well as attached photos.

The Buzz API (the part of the Buzz system that we integrate with) is still very new, and needs additional work by Google before we can add additional Buzz features. That’s why we call this release only the first round.

Google Buzz integration is available to both Free and Professional users.

Professional users have additional features, such as recurring posts and drip-feeding their Buzz accounts available to them.

Select “Social Accounts, Add New Account, Add Buzz” in the menu to add your Buzz profile to your list of social accounts.

When I created the SocialOomph service (it was then known as TweetLater) back in April 2008, one of the first features I added was the ability to automatically unfollow somebody that unfollows you.

That feature has always been part of our Free services, and it has been popular and running non-stop until today.

But, it is now no more. It’s done. It’s kaput. It has been switched off.

Today, May 13th, 2010, a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team informed me that the auto-unfollow feature was breaking their automation rules.

And lo and behold, there actually is a one-liner in those rules that says, “Automated un-following is also not permitted.” Either I did not notice that sentence, or Twitter added it into their rules after I last checked that rules page.

But, that’s besides the point.

To comply with their rules, I’ve disabled the auto-unfollow feature on Twitter accounts. You can still auto-unfollow on StatusNet accounts, and it also does not affect any of the other features of the service.

Really sorry for the inconvenience this is causing you.

Dewald Pretorius
Owner of SocialOomph.com

With our normal update scheduling system, you are required to enter either a fixed date and time or a relative time on every update that you schedule. But what if you had a bunch of updates and you just want the system to drip-feed them into your social accounts, without having to worry about scheduling each one individually?

That’s where the new Update Queues come in.

Each Queue has an update Reservoir attached to it. You put updates into the reservoir, and the Queue drip-feeds those updates into your social accounts over time.

You can connect a Queue to one specific social account, or you can connect it to several social accounts (in which case it will simultaneously drip-feed the updates into all those connected social accounts).

You can also connect more than one Queue to a specific social account, which means you can have several Queues that automatically feed that social account.

For example:

1. Let’s say you create one Queue that you call your “quotes” queue, you also create another Queue that you call your “interesting links” queue, and you create a third Queue that you call your “cool photos” queue.
2. You connect your “quotes” queue to your Twitter account and your Facebook account to drip-feed your quotes into those accounts at a rate of one quote every 12 hours.
3. The “interesting links” queue you connect to your Twitter, StatusNet, and Facebook accounts, and you configure it to drip-feed your interesting links into those accounts at a rate of one update every 3 hours.
4. Lastly, you decide to connect your “interesting photos” queue to your recipes Facebook Page account and your cooking-related Twitter business account, because you’re only going to put links to pics of prepared meals into that reservoir, and you drip-feed your photo links into the accounts at a rate of one update every day.
5. Optionally, you can tell the system to drip-feed the updates only on Monday through Friday, between 8:00 AM and 6:00 PM (these days and times are fully configurable per queue).
6. Now all you need to do is make sure that there are updates in those reservoirs. The system does the rest. You don’t have to spend one second on scheduled dates or times.

If you want, the system will email you when a reservoir has run dry, so that you can add more updates to it.

You add updates to a reservoir with either the standard New Update form (which you use for creating a new scheduled update), or you can bulk upload updates into a reservoir using the Bulk Update Upload feature.

Update are drip-fed from the reservoir in the order they were added, in other words, first-in-first-out.

The drip-fed updates automatically appear as scheduled updates in update lists in SocialOomph from where they are then published to the social accounts by the system.

The Queues feature is available under “Scheduled Updates, Queue Reservoirs” in the menu.

Queues are available only to SocialOomph Professional users.

We have implemented our own URL shortening service, dld.bz, which is now the default shortening service in SocialOomph.

With it, you now get statistics on the clicks on your shortened URLs.

You don’t need to register anywhere or do anything extra. If you have a SocialOomph account, you already have access to dld.bz, and your account is already using the dld.bz service to shorten your links.

All you need to do is view your click stats with “Statistics” in the menu.

If you’re using the authenticated bit.ly option, you can continue to do so. If you prefer to use our dld.bz service, simply remove your bit.ly login and API key information from your SocialOomph account. Our system will immediately start shortening your URLs using dld.bz.

URLs can only be shortened with dld.bz from within your account in the SocialOomph system. We do not allow general public access to the shortening service.

The URL shortening and click tracking service is available to everyone with a SocialOomph account, free and Professional, at no charge.

Please note that on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010, SocialOomph will be down for scheduled maintenance, starting at 5:00 PM EST.

We anticipate the outage to last a few hours. This outage is required to implement performance improvement measures.

After conclusion of the outage, account automation will pick up where it left off. No need to follow or DM anybody manually.

All other automation will be suspended for the duration of the outage.

Scheduled updates will be published when the system comes back online and hence, some updates will be published later than originally scheduled.

In addition to being able to schedule blog posts for WordPress (wordpress.com and self-hosted), Tumblr.com, Blogger.com and any other blogging platform that supports the Blogger, Atom Post, metaWeblog, Moveable Type, or WordPress APIs, you can now also schedule and publish blog posts on your Posterous.com blogs.

This feature is available to SocialOomph Professional users.

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.

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.