Show HN: Echelon – A safe way to manage your company’s Twitter accounts
echelon.io
echelon.io
I've seen more than a few instances where an employee screws up or goes 'rogue' and either goes off on a rant or posts the same thing over and over. It'd be great to only allow employees to post, say, once per hour or whatever, so any problems could be contained.
-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
At first I thought something was wrong because, perhaps, you didn't set a "return to" URL to complete the invitation acceptance (which you should do if it's at all possible, to prevent your users from having to repeat an action). That was the behavior I expected since the invitation URL's log in prompt said "Sign in to accept".
What really happened is that the Twitter authorize call doesn't — in fact — trigger the acceptance of the invitation, it simply creates an Echelon account. I had to hunt down the "Notifications" section through the Menu while there was no sign where I had landed after the OAuth trip that there were any notifications waiting for me.
You should find a way to surface these notifications where you users are going to land after the Twitter authorize call, otherwise the experience is going to be as frustrating for them as it was for me — that is until they do the work your application should be doing for them: letting them know what actions they need to proceed with next in order to have a fully functioning account.
Now I have to say this is a cool app, I especially like the fact that individual user accounts are used and therefore everything can be logged so the whole team can be aware of the outgoing Twitter activity for each "group account".
The key thing here is showing the user they have a new invite/notification, which we will add ASAP.
We're working on some improved user journeys and they'll be rolled out soon. MVP, and all that ;)
Thanks,
-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
-- Pete, founder, Pixie Labs
HootSuite offers this already, and it's only a little bit more expensive than Echelon, so why should we switch? Genuine question as HootSuite has its own problems so I'm always looking for alternatives.
The idea behind Echelon (and its pricing model) is to promote sensible account security around the simplest of actions - tweeting. The bigger your team the more you pay but otherwise you can divide up your accounts however you want (different amounts of access for different people, etc).
"Safe" is the last thing I feel my data would be.
Considering the image on the homepage is just a sketch, is the app actually built or not?
Yes, it is. I agree that we probably need to add some real screenshots too :)
Sure, you are using an access token and not a password for the accounts, but that's not explicitly said anywhere. I suggest you improve the trustworthiness of Echelon on the landing page.
So that's a pretty good tradeoff if you ask me.
How much you want to bet they are doing 0 encryption of the tokens they are storing on their servers.
If you had the ability to do that, I may be interested.