Review: Topify

Topify aims to improve Twitter’s email interaction.  It sends out enhanced follower notifications, and allows you to follow back by replying.  It also allows you to send direct messages to followers through email.  The service is currently in beta: if you apply using the form then message @ourielohayon he might let you use it early.

Notification Emails

The follower notification emails are a massive improvement over Twitter’s.  They display all the information you need to decide if you want to follow someone:

• The user’s avatar
• Location
• Follower/following/update count (useful for gauging how spammy the account is)
• Age of the Twitter account
• URL
• Last update

This is how the email appears in Gmail:

Functionality

Beyond improved notifications, Topify lets you follow people back through email and send them direct messages.  To follow someone, just reply to the notification email.  Topfy will reply to let you know the action was successful.  To subsequently send a direct message, reply to the same email.

Topify’s emails contain a unique code combined with the follower’s Twitter username.  This code is used to determine whether a direct message can be sent — I replied via a different email address to my Twitter/Topify address and the direct message still got sent.

Sign Up Process

Topify’s features make dealing with multiple Twitter accounts much easier.  Following people is annoying when you have to sign in as a different user all the time to do it.

However, you need to give Topify the following details:

• Twitter username
• Twitter email address
• Twitter password

You also need to change your Twitter account’s email address to a special Topify address so they can capture your notifications.

This might sound a little risky, but due to the nature of the service they actually require all of these details to make it work.  You’re handing over security for convenience.

On the upside, we’ve tested Topify and they appear to be fully legitimate: @ourielohayon was helpful and is working hard to promote the service.

Conclusion

Topify saves time and effort, especially when dealing with multiple accounts.  It might be something that becomes huge if Twitter implements API features to integrate this way, and some kind of decentralised authentication.

I have a feeling that this type of service will become popular, especially over auto-following and auto-DMing.  Replying to notification emails is quick and much better than automatically following every spammy account out there.  And a personal DM is clearly better than an automatic message — which often feel like spam, especially if it includes a blog link that’s not relevant to you.

They could definitely monetise the service through ads in follower emails, so there should be some life in the service once it starts to take off.