2011-07-30

Topify Shuts Down Service

Say goodbye to the easy solution to see who you follow and subscribe with a click. Topify shut its doors on August 8th, 2011. Looks like another victim of the restrictive position of Twitter.

Don't forget to change your mail-address in Twitter to one you own, or delete the filters in GMail.

Here is the mail I received today, with an exact explanation, why Topify will leave us:
Hello:
A week ago, without any prior notice, Twitter changed their backend resulting in removing headers from their emails which we used to provide you the Topify service. Once I discovered about this change, I asked on their official developers support forum about it and twice sent a mention to @TwitterAPI account. All of these were unanswered until today. Today they finally posted a clarification:

Many of the emails we send have X-Twitter* headers in them, with pieces of information about the event which triggered them. You might have noticed we've started decommissioning these headers.
If for some reason you were using these headers programmatically in order to detect / process events, you should stop doing it and switch to one of the means supported by the API. For example, the Streaming API. Please let us know if you needed help or if you had questions!
(from: https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/708)
I considered switching to using the Streaming API in the past, but the only option for Topify is to use the Site Streams version of it. But Site Streams are still in beta, and according to the documentation there is no estimated date for it to exit beta. Considering this last episode and other actions by Twitter in the past year, I have no desire to expriment with their beta offerings. Not only this can result in unstable service for you, they might just shut it down one day.
Topify was conceived as a response to long frustration with useless emails. Emails that you couldn’t process from your inbox, emails that had very frustrating mobile experience. Topify was sort of experiment, to see if it can be done better. Judging by your response and adoption, the experiment was successful.

But despite that, on August 5th (next Friday), I will shut down our servers.
What do you need to do? Go to your Twitter settings page: https://twitter.com/settings/account and change the email address there to your own email address.
I would like to use the opportunity and thank Nicolas Toper from CritSend. Nicolas helped me since the beginning both by providing Topify a reliable deliverability solution for emails and by the helpful advices he gave along the way. I also would like to thank you, our users. You made all of these into a very fun and rewarding experience.
If you have any comments feel free to leave them here, email me personally: arik@arikfr.com or tweet (@arikfr).
Thank you all,
Arik Fraimovich
Bye bye, Topify. Twitter just lost an important function.