We were recently contacted by the folks at Twitter:

We’re writing to let you know that your application, EasyTweets, breaks our Automation Rules and Best Practices (http://help.twitter.com/forums/10711/entries/76915). Specifically, it facilitates automated following of users that appear in “continuous searches,” which is not allowed. It’s best for both our users and your users if your application follows the rules, so please make the necessary changes to bring your application into compliance.

In the nearly two years that EasyTweets has been operating, our goal has been to provide easy and efficient marketing solutions for our users, and to do so within all of Twitter’s policies and guidelines.

Given the circumstances, we have had no choice but to remove auto following from EasyTweets or else risk getting blocked from accessing the Twitter platform. We still offer the “continuous searches” with real time alerts and daily summaries, but effective immediately we have removed the “set it and forget it” functionality to automatically follow users based on keyword or geography.

So here’s what we’ve come up with instead: a system to suggest followers based on continuous search criteria, and an easy way to process and either follow or ignore users.

It works like this:

Step 1: Specify keyword and/or geographic criteria via a continuous search, and enter how many follow suggestions you want per day.

Step 2: Navigate to the follow suggestion menu, via either the link in the followers tab or the upper right pulldown menu.

Step 3: Review profiles and select to either follow or ignore the suggested users.

You can learn more about how it works in this video tour: