How We Operate

Overview 

We're a tiny company, trying to focus all our attention on the problems companies and individuals have making sense of their social networks. We charge for subscriptions to cover operating costs and to allow us to work full-time on this project, which we love.

How It Works 

We track how your network changes over time, so we constantly measure who's following you (and who isn't). We also periodically look at all your followers and analyze information about them (like who else they're following and who follows them). We crunch all this data in fancy ways, regenerate reports every night, and present them to you via the Report page, with pretty charts, graphs, and lists. There are currently two pages of overlapping report data.

Your Account 

You can cancel your account at any time by clicking here, or by visiting your Account page. Or email us at support [at] graphedge.com. We want to make it easy for people to cancel. If you're not happy, you're not paying, and we need paying customers.

You can sign-up for GraphEdge by signing-in to our application through Twitter. The service is sometimes closed to new users. We currently do not accept new accounts with trial periods. You can sometimes get around this if you simply join GraphEdge without a trial period.

For "Pro" accounts (all accounts are currently Pro accounts, as we can no longer offer free service for users "lighter" accounts), you may be given a trial period, after which you'll be given the option to join GraphEdge in order to continue to have access to your report and data. If you don't renew immediately, we continue to capture data on your account for a short time (e.g., for a week or two), to give you time to decide. After a while, if you opt not to join, we'll stop collecting new data and eliminate old data in order to make room for another new account.

Certain legacy accounts may be free accounts, however we will close free accounts of users who are clearly not using the service. For example, if you silence the messaging and don't visit for some time, or if you just never visit.

Communication 

Our guiding principle is to be very careful not to "over-communicate"! We never spam. Not with email, not in Twitter.

By default, the service sends an update message every 5 days (unless nothing changed in your network). This is configurable in your Account page (including the ability to opt out of all notifications). The regular notification-cycle commences after a 3-day Welcome period, during which you'll receive a new-account acknowledgement immediately following sign-up, and a "welcome" message on day 3.

If we have an email address on file, we'll use that to send your updates. If we don't have one, and you're following GraphEdge, we'll send your udpates in a Direct Message on Twitter, from @GraphEdge. If you signed-up on the site and are not following GraphEdge, we'll have our @GraphEdgeMsg account post a status update with @YourTwitterName in the message.

If the site is closed to new registrations, users may leave their email address to be notified/invited to join at a later date. Of course, we do send invitations and notifications to those emails, and we do try to tie those back to resultant registrations so we'll know who is who.

Twitter App, Authentication, OAuth 

We use Twitter to authenticate users who sign in to GraphEdge. We don't store your Twitter login information. We never see that information. Currently, our Twitter application asks for read-only rights to your Twitter account. Thus, we do not (cannot!) make any changes to your accounts, like add followers or tweet messages from your account.

We don't currently store your Twitter authentication token, so you must sign-in each time you visit GraphEdge. This may change in future to allow you to stay logged-in to your account across browser sessions.

Privacy 

Email addresses are the only non-public data we store. All the data we use to generate our reports are available via Twitter's APIs. Nevertheless, we're aware that your GraphEdge Report could be a very private thing, so we're very careful not publish links to our users' accounts. Exceptions are limited to Twitter accounts who aren't GraphEdge users but which we unilaterally "onboarded" (e.g. @AmazonDeals which we use as the example on our front page, and @CiscoSecurity which we blogged about).

If you follow @GraphEdge, your updates will include links which take you directly to your report, without the need to sign-in. We use a unique identifier in the URL to accomplish this. If you don't share that link, no one else will be able to view your report without logging in with your Twitter credentials.

We do not store (or even see) your credit card information, but limited information is made available through our payments provider(s).

Money & Payments 

All payment-related transactions are conducted through our payment providers (e.g. Amazon Flexible Payments Service). We do not see or store your billing information, every part of those transactions is managed by the partner. We see the amount that was charged, the name on the payment instrument (e.g. the credit card), and in the case of credit cards, the last four digits (so we'll be able to tell you which of your cards was charged).

Terms 

Regardless of payment, GraphEdge cannot make guarantees of service availability. We work hard to make sure our users are satisfied, but in addition to having our own issues from time to time, we work in conjunction with many partners (Twitter itself, Amazon payments, Bit.ly, our hosting partner(s), and others), any of whom may have issues at any given time.

Likewise, we can make no absolute guarantees for the privacy of your report data or other private information we store. However, we do follow generally accepted industry-wide best practices, and as mentioned before we store very little (if any) information that isn't publicly available.

Our application scales with your Twitter followers. That means that the more followers you have, the harder our application has to work to support your account. Our resources are limited in many ways, including by Twitter themselves. We have only so many requests we can make from them each hour, so we need to make them count. For that reason, we may decline to support accounts with many followers. The current threshold is 120,000 followers. Exceptions may be considered on a case-by-case basis. Additionally, we reserve the right to not accept—or to cancel—any account, at any time, for any reason. For canceled accounts, payments would be refunded on a pro-rated basis.

Our application is a working beta. Please set your expectations accordingly, and please do help us improve the service by letting us know promptly if there are problems, and by suggesting features you'd like to see. If there's a way we can improve the service for you, we want to know about it!

Support 

We take pride in being super-engaged with our users. If you have any question, you can send email to support [at] graphedge [dot] com. If you think that's not going to be fast enough (!) you can also reach out via Twitter to @GraphEdge itself or to @WaldronFaulkner, the founder of GraphEdge.