There has been lots of buzz online surrounding the beta launch of topify, an innovative service from my friends Arik and Ouriel, providing an email access to your twitter notifications. You can ask for an invite to the beta version by starting to follow @topify.
What does Topify do?
I set my twitter preferences to email me whenever I get a DM (direct message). The problem is (was actually) that I cannot ‘Reply’ to those messages – I need to go to my twitter application (mobile, web, desktop) and ‘Reply’ from it. Topify solves that problem. Another feature Topify offers is the ability to follow the people following you – directly from your inbox. You can see the short bio of the person, his/her last update, # of followers/following and other metrics. Want to follow – just ‘Reply’ to the message.
Ezra was kind enough to volunteer for this demo – thanks man! The email thread I captured below has 3 messages: DM I got from Ezra, my reply to him and Topify’s confirmation of that reply. It’s very simple and easy.
You can see the DM Ezra sent me ‘can i volenteer?’ on the top of the image.
Clicking ‘Reply’ via Gmail sends a message to ‘xxx_d_twitterusername@topify.com’ – where xxx stands for a unique topify user, ‘d_twitterusername’ is quite obvious.
Last message in that thread is the confirmation from topify that my message was sent to Ezra.
Now all I need someone to develop is a character counter for Gmail – since twitter allows up to 140 chars, and I’m using Gmail to reply, I lost count of the words, and my message got cut by topify. Arik/Ouriel – planning something like this?
