Topify Lets You Manage Your Twitter Followers Via Email (200 Invites)

If you are not a Twitter power user, you can ignore this post. But if you find yourself increasingly relying on Twitter and spending way too much time managing your followers, trying to figure out who they are, or responding to their private direct messages, you’ll want to try out Topify Created by former TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon and Arik Fraimovich as a tool they needed for themselves, Topify lets users manage their followers and respond to direct messages directly from their email inbox.

Topify is essentially a time saver. Once you set it up (we have 200 invites for TechCrunch readers) by replacing your email in Twitter’s settings with one that Topify provides which redirects back to yours, you get an email every time someone follows you. The email contains a snapshot of that person’s Twitter activity: a one line bio, location, number of followers and followees, Twitter update count, Twitter tenure, and last Tweet (see image). It basically tries to gives you enough information to decide whether you want to follow that person back, which you can do simply by replying to the email.

Topify also lets you reply to direct messages (Twitter’s version of private messages) by replaying directly via email. This saves you the step of having to go back to Twitter and login before responding. These are all basic features which should be part of Twitter, but until then you can use Topify.

For public replies to your Twitter messages, you don’t get an email (because Twitter itself does not offer such notifications). Adding @replies might flood your email inbox, but I actually would prefer getting those as well because I find myself often missing replies and not responding until days later, if at all. As Twitter grows and more people come on board, this tool is especially useful during its viral phase, when the number of followers any individual is accumulating on a daily or weekly basis should be accelerating.