Our Apology Regarding Our Filtering System Glitch

We noticed in today's Upon the Rock Publicist Daily News that a video was featured from the Chelsea Krost Show on an inappropriate topic that made it through our filters. We do not follow this show on our news feeds, but we do follow the main networks of CNN, New York Times, USA Today and it squeezed through from one of those news feeds or a similar one. As a result, we have updated our filters and would like to extend an apology if any of you were offended. 

This is a new online daily that we have recently set up, and we are still working out the details of what RSS feeds we want to include and which ones should be tweaked under different categories. It automatically filters specific news stories into category headlines from our Twitter account based on our follows and the lists we have created. 

Our goal is to be transparent when accidents like this happen so you will feel comfortable in counting on us to deliver informative news and relevant content as it happens, especially in the publishing industry. We appreciate your understanding and hope you will still subscribe to our new online daily. 

The Low Down on TweetAdder 4.0 & Warning on Other Twitter Services

Here is the background: On April 6, 2012, Twitter launched a lawsuit against 5 services, 3 of which were Tweet Attacks, Tweet Adder, and Tweet Buddy claiming that the services violated Twitter's spam policy by providing auto follows/unfollows. (More info here and here.) Tweet Adder was the only service of the three to settle with Twitter and agree to provide alternative solutions. The result was TweetAdder 4.0 with significant changes. 

For the record, and in my humble opinion, TweetAdder has never been a spam software nor did it ever encourage users to spam others. What Twitter didn't like about TweetAdder is that it allowed automated following and unfollowing, but that isn't exactly spam. Traditionally, spam has been defined as sending and/or posting unwanted content to people and places who never subscribed or agreed to receive it. Spam is not following and unfollowing people whether manually or automatically, especially when users have the right and the ability to protect their accounts from being followed without prior approval. 

This post is merely meant to provide a little more information to other users who may have been like me and not following this piece of developing news. TweetAdder was not very transparent in the transition of its services, and certainly not forthcoming and honest about the upcoming changes from TweetAdder 3.0 to 4.0 to current users. As a paying customer, I feel like they at least owed me the truth. 

Even if you want to keep using TweetAdder 4.0, comments have been closed on their help blog. Emails are not being returned. Customers are being ignored, and the new upgraded program keeps crashing. I still believe there are some useful features in the new version, if only I could keep it running long enough to find out for sure. 

After May 24, 2013, the former 3.0 version will no longer be supported and may not work for those who currently have it, so reverting back to the old version may not be an option. 

I caution people who are looking for alternatives to invest in. I've seen a lot of people talking about switching to Tweet Attacks and/or Tweet Marketing Robot (aka: Tweet Demon) on forums, the latter now being touted as the TweetAdder alternative. Please do your homework. Tweet Attacks was listed in the lawsuit as well and their services will soon be unavailable, if not already. Then remains the question, how long will Twitter allow Tweet Marketing Robot to keep operating?

If Twitter refuses to allow the use of automated follow/unfollow services, then it is only a matter of time before they go after other services and have them shut down. Therefore, I caution you to consider this before investing money into another service that claims to be similar to TweetAdder's former services. 

In the meantime, I hope TweetAdder will get their act together and start responding to current customer concerns, crashing issues, and do damage control (PR) for the less than professional way they have handled this transition. As others have already stated all over the Internet, I'm disappointed in the WAY TweetAdder handled this situation. 

As Lynn Serafinn posted on a recent blog post: TweetAdder Could have practiced the Grace of Transparency and I couldn't agree more.