Why did you create Categorical.ly?
I used other excellent tools (such as TweetDeck) for awhile, but they didn't meet my needs. They either were not full featured enough, or I either had to configure them for every computer I used. And if I accidentally left them running, each one would start eating into my allowed hourly Twitter API use.
As I followed more and more people, the number of applications which could make that number of incoming tweets manageable became less and less. Soon I was missing countless tweets from people I was very interested in.
Why is it called Categorical.ly
Because, at its essence, what this application does is divide tweets into categories (or groups) that you can easily scan for information you want.
...and the domain name was available.
Does Categorical.ly Cost Money?
Yes, it does.
How much?
Not a lot. It is $5.95 / month after the trial period. If that seems like a lot to you, send me an email at support@categorical.ly and we'll figure something out.
Why does it cost money? Most other Twitter clients don't charge.
Most other Twitter clients are also not web based. Categorical.ly is not simply a wrapper around the Twitter APIs that most Twitter clients are. Significant server resources are used to process the rules you create against every tweet that comes in. Additionally, we cache a lot of data (such as tweets, locations, etc...) to avoid having to go back to Twitter to look up the same thing over and over. All that costs money. We don't want Categorical.ly to go away, so we charge.
Do you store my Twitter Username and Password?
For the time being, yes.
How come?
Like any Twitter client, Categorical.ly authenticates to Twitter using your credentials. Categorical.ly is constantly working on your behalf. We send tweets on your behalf, as well as pull your tweets and categorize them. All these actions require us to authenticate to Twitter as you.
Categorical.ly is your trusted administrative assistant for Twitter. We weed through the tweets you are not interested in and bring the gems to your attention.
Will you always require our Twitter Username and Password?
No. Twitter is working on implementing a technology called OAuth. What this means is that instead of entering your username and password on our site, you will enter it on Twitter's site, and we will simply get a "token" which lets us act on your behalf.
Twitter released this technology too late in our development cycle for us to implement it for this release. But we will get OAuth working in the next couple months.
Since you store my Twitter Username and Password, how do you keep it safe?
All Twitter Passwords are encrypted using the AES Rijndael data encryption algorithm. All passwords are additionally salted, so even if you chose a weak password, it is no longer a weak password.
Of course, we prefer not to have to store your password at all. We will soon be moving to the OAuth method of authentication (see above).