Good News / Bad News

Good News: Friend Requests are working again . YouTube had changed how Friend Requests work and we needed an emergency fix put in place.

Bad News: The change that YouTube made has also removed the feature where you can add a Friend to a certain group. Now, you can only add Friends and they will show up in your main Contacts lists - you can't specify a group. Why would YouTube remove a feature that was working fine and people liked? Beats me

Other News: You will see your personal 'Start Page' show up when you log in now. This was supposed to show up in the last version but apparently it didn't quite make it in. If you don't like this start page, there is a button to get rid of it in the top right hand corner of the page.

Other Other News: We are working on some new Gathering Features that will allow even more ways of gathering users/videos by 'crawling' YouTube's site like a spider web. These will be in our next planned release (Tuesday, August 19th)

Tube Toolbox Version 2.3 is here!

New Features Include:

* Share Video Updates - We were having problems when people were sending to hundreds or thousands of people at once. We found that you can only send to about 10 users at once. So to get around this program, Tube Toolbox now sends in groups of 10. For example, if you want to Share a Video with 37 people, Tube Toolbox will share with 10 users, then share with 10 more users, then share with 10 more users, then send to the final 7 users. Inbetween each send, you can set your Send Delay to ensure you don't break YouTube's Terms of Use.

* Apply Changes Button - Added to the Select Recipients form so that when you are using the 3rd option (send to users within X days, etc), the list will not repopulate unless you tell it to.

Bug Fixes Include:

* Synchronization - When you synchronize your Friends / Videos or Favorites, it would require you to close and re-open Tube Toolbox for the changes to be seen. Now, the changes show up immediately.

* Gathering Subscribers - We discovered that just like Search Results can't be gathered past page 20 in YouTube, when you are gathering from a list of subscribers, you can only gather a max of 100 pages. Tube Toolbox would gather in and endless loop but now it will exit once YouTube stops giving new users.

Other Changes Include:

* Tube Toolbox Friend Requests - When you launch the new version of Tube Toolbox, it will ask you if you want to subscribe or be a friend with our YouTube Channel (TubeToolboxDotCom). In the previous version, we accidentally made this automatic. So, if you used version 2.2 of Tube Toolbox, you are likely subscribed to TubeToolboxDotCom and also a friend with TubeToolboxDotCom. Please remove these if you wish.

Targeting your audience just got easier with the release of Tube Toolbox 2.1.

We added 9 new ways to gather users and videos. First off, we gave you a quick way to gather from search results directly in the Tube Toolbox interface. Next, we gave you an option to gather SOME of the people on a particular page if you don't want to gather all of them. Simply check the users you want and pick which page you want them put in to. Finally, we added a way to gather from 7 areas of any particular User's profile: Friends, Subscribers, Subscriptions, Comments, Videos, Favorites and Bulletins.

We also did a complete run through and tested ALL features in Tube Toolbox which we haven't tested recently to make sure that everything is working and up to date. We found a bunch of little issues that were fixed so version 2.1.0.0 is even more solid than 2.0.0.0.

A change to YouTube's website temporarily broke sending Friend Requests which was fixed. Thanks to those who informed us and remember to always notify us via our Forum.

We also added a couple shortcut keys, for example "Ctrl+Y" will take you to YouTube.com and "Ctrl+H" will take you to your YouTube Home Page.

We recently posted a description on our homepage about each bulk feature and what it's best use is. I have decided to paste it below also.

 Bulk Friend Requests

Sending Friend Requests is a great way to get more people to view your YouTube Channel on a daily basis. Most people who accept your Friend Request (and even those who don't) will check out your Channel and view a video or two on your page (more if they like what they see). Sending Automated Friend Requests is a good way to gradually gain exposure over time but not a great way to gain Video Views in a short period of time. However, once you have amassed a great deal of Friends, you can send out Bulletins (messages) which get sent to ALL of your friends so eventually it will lead to a great way to reach many people at once. Automated Friend Requests are always recommended for everyone no matter what your goal is but if you are looking to promote your videos and increase video views in a quick period amount of time, it is probably best to dedicate most your time to other Tube Toolbox features see below.

 Bulk Message Sending

Send mass-automated messages is great when you are promoting something outside of YouTube (your website for example). Messages are the only way to include a URL in any kind of contact with a user unless you embed it in your video for example. Messaging can be slow - YouTube only allows you to send out about 16 messages per hour. To get around this, Tube Toolbox allows you to add 'Proxy Accounts'. So you can have your regular account (for example "MyYTAccount"), then you can create more accounts in YouTube ("MyYTAccount2", "MyYTAccount3", "MyYTAccount4", etc) and Tube Toolbox will cycle through them sending messages. For each account created, it adds about 16 messages per hour. If you know that the list of people you have gathered is targeted to a group of people that will be interested in what you are selling/promoting then Messages are almost always worth your time. If you are sending messages to random people, then probably better to spend your time using another tool.

 Bulk User Profile Comments

If you do not have a targeted audience, then Bulk User Comments are a great option. Comments are posted on user profiles where everyone else can see them (as opposed to Messages where only the person you send it to will see it). The downside is that you can't post URLs. You can get creative "Tube Toolbox dot com" instead of "TubeToolbox.com" but YouTube even blocks some of those variations so try them out before using Tube Toolbox to make sure that you aren't wasting the sends. With Comments, after every 5 or 6 comments, you will be asked to enter a Security Code (also known as CAPTCHA). Tube Toolbox gives you two options to bypass CAPTCHA. If you are at your computer, you can simply enter the Security Code or you can tell Tube Toolbox to wait 10 minutes for the code to go away and continue sending. Mass Comments are more like blind shots at a dartboard because you're not sure who is actually going to read them but they will remain on a User's Profile indefinitely which means you get exposure 24 hours per day for a long period of time. It also means that you might not want to write about time-sensitive items. If you post a comment about a "Brand New Video", someone might end up reading it a year later and the video is no longer new and perhaps not even on your account or relevant.

 Bulk Video Text Comments

Many people use this to post text comments to popular videos on YouTube or videos that are similar to the ones that they are promoting. For example, if you are a rock band with similar music to Pearl Jam, you could gather all videos from a "Pear Jam" search and post a comment on all of them that says "If you like this kind of music, check out my profile - we have great similar stuff". Like comments on User Profiles, comments on Videos will last indefinitely so people could read them today or a year from now and they will not only be viewed by the people who made the video but by everyone who looks at the video. Another way to promote is to gather the Top Videos for the day on YouTube and keep posting on those because those are the videos that are getting the most view and most comment views. This will get random users however and not a targeted audience.

 Bulk Subscriptions

Believe it or not, this is another great way to increase subscribers, increase friends, increase views and gain exposure. All over YouTube, you see people posting "Sub4Sub", etc. This means that if you subscribe to someone's channel, they will subscribe to your channel. Doing bulk Subscriptions in Tube Toolbox will end up getting many people to subscribe back to you and take a look at your Channel. Plus, you are now associated with their account and show up in their list of Subscribers. This means that if someone is browsing their channel, your Channel, Image and Videos will show up and could spark someone's interested in you.

 Bulk Share a Video

Sharing a video is the best way to promote a single video to many people at once. You can select one of your videos and send it to many people at once (not one at a time like other bulk features). The downside is that YouTube is not reliable. Even though you can share a video with 1,000's of people at once using the YouTube interface, if you try to do it, it will give you a message saying "Server Error" because YouTube could not handle the request (too big). So, we recommend sending to 100 people or less at a time. You will immediately see an increase in your video views for whichever video you are sharing.

The long anticipated release of Tube Toolbox 2.0 is here as promised!  We decided to take Tube Toolbox to the next level with a whole new look and a load of new features. The changes were so drastic that we could do notihng less than call this version Tube Toolbox 2.0. Please read below about all of the exciting new changes. We are currently working on brand new Help Videos to go along with the new version and will let you all know when they are ready. Just like any major release, we did as much testing as possible but there were so many changes that we expect a few minor bugs here and there so be sure to post any issues in our online Forums. I have created a special place to post responses about version 2.0: http://www.tubetoolbox.com/forums/default.aspx?g=posts&m=681&#681

[New Features]

Redesigned Main Interface
We simply ran out of room on the main screen because there were too many features in Tube Toolbox! To solve the problem, we removed the buttons from the top and created a whole new side panel where the 'Tools' are nicely grouped. You can expand or collapse groups as you please and the state of the panels (expanded or collapsed) will be saved between sessions. Please take a minute to see what is available (maybe you'll even find a feature that you didn't know Tube Toolbox had).

Include Username in Messages & Comments
You can now personalize messages and comments by including the user's Username in the message. Simply type "#UN#" (without the quotes) anywhere in your message and it will automatically be replaced by the Username for each person when messages/comments are sent out.

Export Users & Videos
You can now export a list of Users or Videos if needed in "Comma Separated" format or "XML" format. This will allow you to exchange lists between accounts or save lists to be moved between computers.

Auto-Update Notes
When new versions of Tube Toolbox are released and there had been more than one release between your current version and the new version, you will be able to see a complete list of changes for each version. Currently, you can only see the changes in the most recent version.

Gather from Search Results
You can now type search criteria directly into Tube Toolbox and gather the search results with a single click.

Uploading Files
From time to time we ask our users to send us Log Files or their Data File which can be a hassle. We added a feature within Tube Toolbox which allows you to do this with a single click of the button instead of the previous way - searching for the files on your computer and emailing it to us.

New Settings
* When you select the Max number of pages to gather, this value will be saved between sessions which means that you won't need to set it each time. Pick a value you like and you can just stick with it.
* When you select a Send Delay (Mix & Max), these values will be saved between sessions as well so if there is a particular delay that you like to use, it will automatically come up each time you do any type of Bulk Sending.

Remove Closed / Suspended Accounts
After any type of bulk sending, Tube Toolbox can automatically removed Closed & Suspended accounts from your lists to ensure that you don't waste time trying to send to them again in the future.

Affiliate Pages
For those of you who signed up to be an Affiliate and earn $12 for each person you refer to Tube Toolbox (and a FREE LIFETIME TUBE TOOLBOX ACCOUNT if you refer 10 people), we have added an extra layer of tracking to our website - Cookies. Now, even if the user doesn't download Tube Toolbox the first time they go to our site, the Cookies will remember who referred them when they visit in the future and you are guaranteed to get credit for the referral. Not an Affiliate yet? Why not?? It's FREE, easy to sign up and can earn your some nice extra CASH. Info & Sign Up here -> http://www.sincell.com/Affiliates 
 


[Enhancements]

Sending History Enhancements
You can now filter the Sending History by type of send (Comment / Messages / Friend Request / etc) and also filter by a date range. More columns of information have been added to the report and the report can be sorted by Date, Username, Videoname or Send Type. This will give you a lot of basic information but let us know if there are any other type of reports that you'd like to see.

Select Recipients Enhancements
There have been several changes to the select recipients interface. First of all, you can now filter by a time interval. So instead of only being able to select "Send a Message to users who I have never sent to before" you can do things like "Send a Message to users who I have not sent to in the past 2 weeks" (or any other internal). Friend Requests & Subscriptions do not have this feature because you can only ever send one to a user anyway. You can now sort your items by Date Gathered, Alphabetical or Random. You can re-randomize the list by clicking a Random button as many times as you like. You can select and unselect people from the list easily now. Finally, when sending to a group of users, you can easily add a single user to the list even if they are not in any of your groups simply by typing in their name.

Sending Status Enhancements
You can now make changes to settings while in the middle of doing a bulk send. For example, you can change the Send Delay, change the Auto-Retry when limit is hit & also change your Security Code (CAPTCHA) preferences in the middle of a bulk send.


[Bug Fixes]

General Gathering Problems
Updates have been made to the Gathering section where Errors were happening previously. If you still have any problems gathering, please send us the EXACT PAGE & CIRCUMSTANCES that you are trying to gather. That includes usernames or keywords that you have searched, etc.
 
Stop Button Fix when Gathering
There was a problem when gathering users - the Stop button would cause an error and Tube Toolbox would crash. This problem has been fixed. PLEASE NOTE that when you click Stop, it must finish from gathering the current page that it is on before stopping. So it will not be instantaneous - it may not stop until a few seconds after you click the button.

Groups show up on Friend Request screen
Your Groups were not showing up on the Bulk Friend Request screen in the previous version. This problem has been fixed.


[Recap]
As you can see, there were TONS of new features and enhancements made in this version. Please email us (or preferable post in our forums) with any problems or suggestions that you have regarding Tube Toolbox 2.0. We did as much testing as we could but anticipate people running into a little issues that we will resolve with a new release next week. Thanks for your support and good luck with your continued YouTube Success!

Hey Folk, new release, new features. Instead of packing tons of new features into a new release and waiting weeks to release it, we decided to put out more incremental releases.

[NEW FEATURES]

New Sending Interface: When sending Friend Requests, Messages or Comments, you will notice a new real-time sending status. It will show you the total number of successes and failures. It will show you elapsed time and the results of each individual send. It also allows you to Pause sending (new feature). It also allows you to put the status window in the System Tray (little icon in the corner of Windows) or minimize the window if you don't want it on your desk top.  

Manage Lists: New feature allows you to add/remove users to/from your User Lists. More to come, but this should give you a good start with the functionality.

YouTube Maintenance: If YouTube is performing maintenance on their website, Tube Toolbox will recognize it and pause sending.

Failure Reports: This is the 4th release in a row where we added code to report problems back up to us. If a send fails, it sends us information which we can examine and fix problems for future releases. This has been a huge help so far. 

[Bug Fixes]

International Dates: We had people in Fance and Italy that were having problems with Tube Toolbox and I found that a root of a lot of the problem had to do with how dates are formatted in other countries. I made some changes which will fix some of these problems.

[NOTES]

Many changes were made to the code for sending when the new sending status screen was implemented. So, please let us know of any issues that you run in to.

Power accounts have been eliminated. From now on, Personal users will be able to make unlimited video downloads. 

We have a whole list of great upcoming features (copy and pasted in from requests and in no particular order) here: http://www.tubetoolbox.com/upcomingfeatures.aspx

A new version of Tube Toolbox has been released which includes some emergency fixes, some general bug fixes and a few new features.

 Emergency Fixes

• Bulk Message Sending - YouTube changed the way messages are sent out so we needed to change Tube Toolbox. The fix is complete but since it was completely re-done, please let us know if you run into any problems. Related to message sending - it looks like with the new interface on YouTube, you can send the same messages to multiple people at once. We don't know any more than you at this point but it seems like perhaps we could work this feature into Tube Toolbox for more efficient message sending.

New Features

•  Hide in System Tray. When bulk sending, we had a request from a user that they would like to be able to hide the Tube Toolbox in the system tray so that it didn't take up room in their task bar. To use this feature, click on Settings from the Options menu.
  
  
• Gather Page Count. When gathering users/videos you can now optionally select a maximum number of pages to gather.

Bug Fixes

• We had reports that gathering users and videos was not picking up ALL users and videos on the page. We went in and re-worked the feature and believe that it is working 100% correctly now. If there is a particular page where it isn't picking up the Users or Videos that you think it should, please email support@TubeToolbox.com and let us know the page.
  
  
• User/Video name fixes. When gathering user names and videos, we found that sometimes it would extract a name incorrectly (for example, "ttpromo1&ref=1" instead of just "ttpromo". It should always gather names correctly now and Tube Toolbox will actually fix those bad names that are currently stored in your database the first time that the new version runs.

Other Notes

• GET PAID TO TELL PEOPLE ABOUT TUBE TOOLBOX!! We are working on creating an Affiliate Program where you can get paid (or get Free months added to your Professional Account) when you refer others to Tube Toolbox. For a sneak peak, take a look at http://www.TubeToolbox.com/AffiliateSignUp.aspx . Keep in mind that it is not complete yet. We will hopefully have it done by May 14th.
  
  
• New Status Page. We are working on a Status Page that our customers can check in on to see what new features we are working on for future releases and also give updates for when features are broken or being worked on. It's not done yet, but will be at http://www.TubeToolbox.com/Status.aspx
  
  
• Instructional Videos Back. Most of our demo videos are back online after YouTube took down our account. We may have perminantly lost a few of them but we'll work on re-creating them and posting back on our site.

We are VERY excited to announce the release of a new version of Tube Toolbox. There are many changes that you will notice and some that are behind the scenes. Please take the time to read below all of the great things that were added in this release.

New Professional Features

• Featured Videos. Tube Toolbox now has a section for featured videos displayed on the main window. Good news for our Professional Users - YOU will be our featured videos! Each Professional User of Tube Toolbox may set one of their videos as a featured video within Tube Toolbox and all users who log in will be shown four featured videos randomly (including yours!). Simply right click on one of your videos listed along the left hand side and select "Set as Tube Toolbox Featured Video."
  
  
• Subscription Invites. Yes, Tube Toolbox (finally ) has subscription invites and they couldn't be any easier. Simply select how many invites you would like to send out, which contact list to send to and click the 'Start' button. Tube Toolbox handles the rest.
  
  
• Multi-Account Message Sending. YouTube has put so many limits on message sending that we had to break out the big guns on this one. When sending messages, you can now add multiple accounts into Tube Toolbox and Tube Toolbox will cycle through the accounts sending out messages. That way, your sending limit is not reached as quickly. You only need one Professional account to use this feature - the other accounts that you cycle through can be Personal accounts. As strange as it may sound, we are actually against SPAM so please do not abuse this feature.

New Personal / General Features

• Help Icons on ALL screens. You will no longer be confused when using Tube Toolbox :)  All screens have a help icon (question mark). Simply click on the question mark for a full interactive demo showing you how to use the feature.
  
  
• High Definition Video. There were some recent articles on the Internet about how to watch high definition videos in YouTube. We decided to incorporate them into Tube Toolbox. Anytime that you are watching a video, you can click on the "HD" button to the right of the address bar and the video will be loaded in HD. If you right-click on any videos in your list, you can also click Vide -> High Definition.
  
  
• Important Notices. In the past, if changes to YouTube temporarily broke Tube Toolbox, our users were left clueless and out in the dark. We have added special notification to all of our users in this new version. Anytime that we need to tell all of you a message, the message will appear when Tube Toolbox first loads. You will no longer be left in the dark.
  
  
• Video Demonstrations. We have created full walk throughs for each of our tools in Tube Toolbox and posted the videos on both our website and our help sections in Tube Toolbox. Please take a minute to check them out and let us know if you have any further suggestions on areas to create demos.
  
  
• Updated Website. TubeToolbox.com has been updated with a new screenshot, more release information and demos of all of our features.
  
  
• Tube Toolbox Forum Membership. You no longer have to create a new account to post messages in our forums. Simply log in using your YouTube username and password. Please take advantage of this valuable resource.
  
  
• Video Analytics. To view how many downloads your video has each day or where the downloads are coming from, right-click on your video on the left hand side of the screen and select View -> Video Analytics. You may only few these stats for your own videos.
  
  
• Clear All Data. We added a feature that allows you to clear all of your Tube Toolbox data and start from scratch. To see how this is done, please watch the video from our help section.
  

Bug Fixes / Enhancements

• Downloading Videos. We found out that users were having trouble downloading videos that required age verification and have fixed that issue. Downloading videos is now as smooth as ever.
  
  
• Creating New Lists. When you are gathering users and you create a new list, that new list will become your default selection. Just one less mouse-click for you to do.
  
  
• Bad Usernames/Videos. We had reports of invalid usernames or videos being picked up when gathering from a page which has been fixed.
  
  
• Safeguards. We have added one feature which you won't see that will help keep Tube Toolbox running even if YouTube makes changes to their website that would have previously broken Tube Toolbox. We will continue to add as many safeguards as possible to ensure your account stays up and running.
  
  
• Error Logging. We have improved our error logging which lets us know when users are having problems and allows us to quickly resolve any issues.
  
  
• Recipients List. When selecting your recipients list, we now exclude your own name from the list to make sure that your bulk sends get to the right people.
  
  

Hello Tube Toolbox Users!

We put out this 'emergency' release because YouTube made changes to their site which broke Tube Toolbox. The only problem is that we are right in the middle of making a bunch of changes that have not been fully tested. So... we recommend laying off the new features for a couple days. This weekend we will put out an official release and describe all of the new great features.

Thanks!
-Toolman