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Autofollowing people on Twitter just got a whole lot easier.

Last month we wrote a detailed tutorial on methodshop.com that walked you through how to setup up your Twitter account to autofollow anyone who follows you using a service called TweetLater. Part of the process involved making an autoforward rule in Gmail. But after getting an inbox full of undelivered mail this past weekend, we figured we should sign in to TweetLater.com and see what was up.

It turns out that Twitter recently updated their API and TweetLater no longer requires you to forward emails to them using Gmail. Here's a blog post from TweetLater with more details about the update:

Thanks to a positive addition to the Twitter API, TweetLater was able implement a completely different way of identifying new followers.

We now get that information directly from the Twitter API, and we do not need your forwarded Twitter new follower notification emails anymore.

Please remove/delete/inactivate the forwarding rule that forwards emails to twitterfollow@tweetlater.com.

You can do this right now because we have already migrated the new follower processing for your Twitter account over to the new and far more efficient method.

At this point in time we'll be processing your new followers once a day, but we may do it more often in the future.

Even though we process your followers once a day, we automatically spread out your welcome message throughout the day. Your new followers won't all get their welcome messages at the same time. In other words, if you publish public welcome tweets, your timeline will not be littered with a bunch of welcome messages all at once. And, if you send DMs, you will see the DMs drip-feed into your Sent DM folder throughout the day.

If you have new follower vetting turned on in TweetLater, then know that it will still work as before. The only change is that your new followers are added to that list once a day now, as opposed to through-out the day. (If you haven't checked out the new follower vetting feature yet, please do so now. It is really cool.)

There's a lot of good news in this announcement. If you've struggled in the past to get your automation working, it will now "just work" (provided that we still have your valid Twitter username and password on file).

If you previously used this methodshop.com tutorial to setup your Twitter account to autofollow your followers, then you'll need to disable the Gmail auto forward rule. We've also updated the tutorial with some new instructions.





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Labels: internet, social networking, tutorial