I first fell in love with HootSuite over a year ago as a way to manage multiple social media accounts and feeds. But in the past several months the company has become less-and-less focussed on its core product and more and more focussed on a monetization strategy that, in my opinion, is detracting attention from the thing it did best.
Here’s the latest sign that HootSuite is verging on unusable for me:
I went ahead and reenabled it – for now. If anyone knows of a good replacement (not TweetDeck, which shit the bed as soon as Twitter bought it) please let me know in comments.
And to find out how I got that nifty alert and more about protecting your privacy online, see my review of PrivacyFix.
I am not a big fan of HS. They have a security loop hole which can be dangerous. Plus the company is not very social. Once I invited them to be a guest on my chat, and they asked me to ban a member. It was ridiculous. Of course I chose my community over that brand.
Have you tried jugnoo? It is pretty new
worth a try. The dashboard format is similar to HS and Tweetdeck.
Thanks for the recommendation: I’ll add it to the list of things to try this weekend.
@Dave: I spoke with the HootSuite Support team (@hootsuite_help) and they told me that based on Chrome’s new privacy settings what you were asked is standard for Chrome and is only to allow the Hootlet to work in Google Chrome. HootSuite isn’t collecting any information except to enable the Hootlet to post content a users chooses.
@Cami: They’ve never had security issues of any kind so I’d love to learn more about this supposed ‘loop hole’. HootSuite and their organization are incredibly social. I’ve even visited their offices. I can’t imagine them ever asking you to ban anyone that’s not there style.
You should look into if you were speaking with someone who actually works there and let the actual team know because HootSuite would never behave the way your describing.
Hi Doug,
Sometimes these new tools can get frustrating indeed. In this case, there were changes in Google Chrome’s permissions which resulted in this error. It’s not us asking for more info at all.
The Help Desk is the best place to check for info about these types of conundrums. Here are 2 specific articles which will shed light.
http://help.hootsuite.com/entries/22163608-updating-permissions-for-hootlet-2-1
http://help.hootsuite.com/entries/22133631-disabling-twitter-handle-redirect-in-the-hootlet
Ms. Pham, while we’ve now exchanged tweets about your situation, i must point out for the record, that we are very social in that we manage & monitor 50+ presences in 15 languages on a daily basis and as a company push out hundreds of personal replies to folks each day. While sometimes requests slip through the cracks, it’d be unfair to my team for me not to point out our diligent social activations on a daily basis.
Thanks again to both of you for sharing your feedback – we read everything and will continue to evolve and improve.
Hm, I use(d) Hootsuite often for my job. I may be reevaluating that decision come tomorrow morning upon arrival at the office. Thanks for the info, I had no idea they were becoming this invasive.