Yesterday, @GuyKawasaki posted an update on Twitter about SocialToo, which promises to effectively filter out spam from your direct messages (DMs) on Twitter. The buzzword was “SocialToo declares war on Twitter spam.”

I’ve stayed away from my DM box for a few weeks now – I get tons of automated messages and unsolicited offers of “free gifts” from thinly-disguised marketers in there, and legitimate messages were getting lost in the muck. I’ve been exclusively using the @reply format to communicate with friends since I gave up on the DM.

Of course, I wanted to reclaim my DM box from spammers and MLM marketers, so naturally, I was interested in this new tool.

I logged in using my Twitter account (through OAuth, which is a good thing, for security reasons) and immediately set my filter options under the Preferences tab. Here’s a screenshot of some keywords I used in the filter:

The result?  Zero automated DMs in the last 24 hours!

It’s good to have my DM box back, so thank you SocialToo.  Yes, this tool actually works to effectively filter out spam from your DMs. If that’s all the utility you need right now, I strongly recommend SocialToo.

How about the other features? Unfortunately, the filter function appears to be SocialToo’s only useful feature.

You can login using only one site, so it’s either you log in through Twitter or through Facebook, which effectively removes available information about the the other not logged-in site.

The premium features are practically useless and designed for people who just want to gather as many followers as possible on Twitter, without any concern about quality. No SocialToo,  I don’t want to pay $20 and let you send me daily emails about my followers.

Since I don’t use auto-follow or auto-unfollow, I’m left with the Social Survey feature where you can post a survey question with a set of choices for your friends to answer.

Interesting, but what’s not cool is that the system sends auto-DMs to all your followers, which practically defeats the purpose of why I’m using the tool, in the first place. You filter out spam from other people, but you spam your friends with a survey out of the blue. In fairness,  you may have a more receptive audience if you warn them beforehand, that you’re sending out a survey through SocialToo.

So, will I continue using SocialToo? Yes, if only for the filter function. I can’t imagine spending any significant amount of time on that site, there’s nothing else to do or utilize in there.

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