Well, dear friends, I’m afraid the time has come. It turns out that Twitter is no longer happy to let the SyncAssist system do its thing. I received notice over the weekend that the service has been suspended and will not be restored.
I tried appealing and, well, lets just say that didn’t go so well.
Due to the severity of the violation, this Twitter account and API key, along with all other associated accounts and applications, are permanently suspended and will not be restored. Additionally, all keys registered for this application in the future will also be suspended.
Oops.
So, what to do from here?
Well, l still have read access which means that SyncAssist is still monitoring the @AmexOffers account to see when new promos are available. And I can tell if registered users have sent a tweet registering for the available offers. That means I can still ease the registration process by creating links which will sign you up for all the currently active but unregistered options out there. But it is a manual process. You would still have to come to the SyncAssist website, click on the appropriate link on that page and submit the tweet. And if you’re doing it for lots of accounts you’ll need to log in to twitter anew for each one. I suppose I could also have it send you an email with the link to tweet if that would help. It is a most shitty approach to the problem but I don’t have anything better I can think of available.
Obviously this is not something I’m happy about. More than 2,400 different twitter accounts registered for nearly 200 different AmEx offers during the 14 months the service was online. That’s nearly 175,000 deals registered. And I know some of that resulted in unexpected savings. This is one of my favorite bits a user shared with me at one point:
LOL–I have your auto-Amex-sync service to thank for this $5, I guess. Well, that and the dumb BP pump that authorized my UA visa 2x (and successfully held a couple hundred bucks of available credit) but then errored out, forcing me to use my Amex without even knowing about this promo, but you get at least half the credit.
So, yeah, people saved a lot of money without working too hard at it. Alas, that’s over now. I wish there was something else I could do but Twitter seems quite keen on not letting that happen. Sorry.
And, obviously, if you’ve been paying for the First Class tier on the site so as to have this automated functionality then I recommend you not renew that.
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What was the violation that made them ban you?
They never say. I asked a few times and just got a generic “violated the T&Cs” type response.
This is a major bummer, I signed up like last month!
Thanks for all you do, Seth! (Still staying on as paid member!)
Like everyone, I’m sorry to see the service go and appreciate what it did while it was running.
For the future, I’d suggest a single email per offer that gives the twitter handle for registration. Since I use tweetdeck for multiple accounts, I would take it from there. For those with only a few accounts, you could refer people back to your syncassist page where the links for their unregistered accounts will live. The syncassist page would also have a value to tweetdeck users since after sending my tweetdeck, I can verify that the sync took.
Seth, thanks for a GREAT service! I made well over $2K on AMEX offers due to the ease of your tool automating the process!
Like the other commenter above, for the future, I’d suggest a single email per offer that gives the twitter handle for registration. I could then use tweetdeck for multiple accounts!
Thanks!
Argh…this sucks. I do have to say thank you for the tool and all you did to develop it and keep it running. I earned a ton of money in gift cards purchased through some of these deals, with minimal credit card spend.