Interview With Co-Founder of Topify Plus Invites

If you are like me, preferring to check every Follower Notification that you get from Twitter, then the default email notification is, let’s just say, Basic! It does what it says on the thin, i.e. notifying you that somebody is following you, and that’s it.

So, for me to decide if I want to follow the person back or not, I have to click on the profile link to go to the online profile page of the follower, check the profile, follow/unfollow or block the person; and then back to the email for the next one. Normally, I would be ok with this, but when you have to review tens of these everyday, it’s becoming less enjoyable and sometimes plain annoying, not to mention this whole switching back and forth business is just a waste of time (time better spent to do some Twittering, mind).

But just like any other problems in the Internet, somebody somewhere has already thought about it, and built the solution for it. Let me introduce you to Topify, a replacement service for the default Twitter Email Notification that shows you the full profile of the follower, including his/her latest Tweets, plus some more useful stats information, and allows you to follow/unfollow or block the person, directly from the convenience of your email application! No more back and forth between email and the main profile page, which really cuts more than half the time I usualy took with the default notification.
Moreover, and this is a killer for me, it allows you to ‘reply’ your DM by just replying to the DM notification email. That’s a dream comes true for some people.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the enhance notification that Topify gives, enables you to help to decide if you want to follow back (or not), and to action that decision, all in the same place.

Last week, I managed to contact Arik Fraimovich (@arikfr) who’s the co-founder of Topify, to answer some questions about a bit of background of Topify, how the idea was born, and what we can expect for the future releases. And as a bonus, I also managed to ask him to give us some invites to Topify (currently invite only), which I will give them away at the end of this post.

Without further ado, here is the interview with Arik:

1. Could you tell us a bit more about Topify? Who are involved? Where are you base?

Topify is a private venture which was founded by myself (Arik Fraimovich, Creative Geek & Internet Entrepreneur) and Ouriel Ohayon (@OurielOhayon, Founder and former editor of TechCrunch France. General Manager of LightSpeed Gemini Internet Lab dedicated to internet seed investment). Besides us we got help from Nicolas Toper from MxM (they send our emails reliabely) and OCS Solutions who provide us the hosting solution. We both are from Israel, but it’s a global world, so our true base is on Twitter :-)

2. How did you come up with Topify? How was the idea born?

I got the idea from a blog post Ouriel wrote few months ago. He talked about the fact that startups don’t consider the email notifications that they send as part of their service and that there’s a lot to improve in the notifications we receive today. I felt the same, and decided to improve Twitter’s notifications and hacked over a weekend the first version of Topify. After that I talked about it with Ouriel and together we built the new version of Topify.

3. Tell us more about the features that Topify provides.

The purpose of Topify is to empower your Twitter email notifications and to allow you to act on them from your inbox – wherever you process it, whether it’s Gmail , your iPhone or BlackBerry. Our main features are:
1. Enhanced new follower notification, including full profile of the users + avatar + last updates + stats from Mr. Tweet and other providers in the future.
2. Easy follow back by just replying.
3. Easy block and unfollow from any notification we send you by just forwarding to block@topify.com or unfollow@topify.com
4. Enhanced dm notification (currently we add only an avtar of the user sending the DM) + easy reply to the DM by just replying to the notification.

4. How would you compare yourself to Twimailer?

We been there before them and we will be there after them. Unlike Twimailer, our vision to build something sustainable that will provide value to our users. You can read more about our thoughts on Twimailer here:

[Notes from me: Previously I used Twimailer too, but recently it stopped sending notification, so I abandoned it. Only from reading the following links that I became aware of what was going on]
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/twimailer_security.php
http://blog.topify.com/post/93778646/acquiringcompetition

5. What can we expect in the future release?

We currently put our main focus on the already existing notifications and making the service sustainable and reliable. I believe we will release some exciting new features in the coming weeks as:
1. Spam reports
2. Daily/weekly digest of new followers
3. Maybe something like Qwitter (another notification service, that sends you email whenever somebody unfollow you)
4. Filtering of new followers
And much more. These are only the obvious enhancements – there are a lot more that we plan that will surprise everyone :-)

I thank Arik, for taking his time to answer my questions. We will be waiting for more updates in the future. This is already one of the best Twitter App I’ve seen, and I’m the biggest fan.

And now for the invites, Arik has generously gave us some 70 invites which you can use straightaway to enjoy Topify.

The only things I would like you to consider in return are either:

1. Subscribe to Media Sosial either by RSS or Email (on the sidebar).
2. Or Follow Media Sosial at Twitter @mediasosial
3. Or Comment on this post with your Twitter Username (so I can follow you back)

And for that I thank you.

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