Beta service Topify hopes to make managing your Twitter contacts easier both by enhancing your new follower emails with additional information, and enabling email direct message replies. Similar to another service we reported on last week, Topify distinguishes itself by taking a multi-pronged approach to making email your new Twitter control center.
Topify is the brainchild of Ouriel Ohayon (@ourielohayon) and Arik Framovitch (@arikfr). They realized that for a lot of us, managing new Twitter notifications and direct messages can often be a hassle that the Twitter interface doesn’t make any easier. Their solution is a service that hooks itself in to Twitter in two places, revamping new follow notifications, adding support for following back, and replying to direct messages directly from email.
The benefits are clear, but just like with other services hoping to ride Twitter’s rise to fame, the lack of a Twitter authentication mechanism means that you must give Topify both your login name and password, and redirect your Twitter notification emails to the Topify service. This requires a lot of trust on your part. The good news is the site has a fairly broadly-worded privacy policy:
Privacy policy (of sorts): Rest assured we will never knowingly disclose, sell, give away or otherwise use any personal information collected during your use of this site (namely, the twitter usernames and passwords provided). Honest.
Finally, we would like to compare the ‘enhanced’ Twitter follow email between Topify and Twimailer. Topify in the last 24 hours has re-vamped their email to show the follower’s information more clearly (see below), but there is one place where Twimailer still stands out – it lists the last 10 tweets from the follower, while Topify only shows one.
The scale, at least for us, still tips in Topify’s favor though, for a few reasons. First, Topify adds more functionality than just an enhanced follow email. Second, although the privacy policy is still far from completely re-assuring, it’s still better than Twimailer’s. Third, we like that we can easily find Ouriel’s Twitter and blog links, which we can’t say for the somewhat mysterious creator(s) of Twimailer.
Last but not least, Ouriel has given ReadWriteWeb 50 free beta invites, so click on this link and get started!
Update:We were recently informed by Ouriel in the comments that the updated notification email now contains the last 5 tweets, along with knowing if you are already following the person, and a link to promote Topify. You can see a screenshot of it here. Thanks, Ouriel!
