Wow! Impressive! You might have noticed the public beta being online already (although the official launch is on Monday 1st of June, timezone issue?). Seems to work great and we’re glad to announce that we’ve reached 1000 unique profile views already! Thanks for your support everone!

One more thing, about the Foller.me Rundown. We’ve got some reports stating that the Rundown tweets could get annoying every hour, so we changed that frequency down to twice a day. Hope nobody minds that ;)

We’re ahead of our plan and glad to announce that the Foller.me Rundown feature (which was planned for July 2009) is already running! Up and steady!

What’s this “Rundown”? Well, basically it’s a popularity contest. Everytime somebody checks a user profile on Foller.me, we log that into our database. Once every hour or so, we look in there, and dig out the 5 most popular people (with the most profile hits), then tweet them out public via @follerme!

So, who’s are the Foller.me celebrities? Well that’s an easy one. Just take a look at @follerme’s profile and the @mentions cloud. Hope to see your name there ;)

Oh, and we DON’T like pseudo-hackers trying to get themselves to the top. We log everything and we ban, okay? So be careful…

Are you using Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Internet Explorer? Or perhaps some other OpenSearch-enabled browser? Well, we’ve just released an OpenSearch plugin for quick access to Foller.me profiles.

To enable the plugin, just browse to foller.me, you’ll notice a signal in your searchbox, indicating that there’s a new search plugin available. Click the drop-down list and select “Add Foller.me”. There you go!

Detailed Twitter profiles in a flash! By the way, you might be looking for a press-release or something before we launch. Well yes, @kovshenin’s written one for you: kovshenin.com/849.

We’ve just received approval from Twitter for our 20,000 Twitter API calls per hour! Isn’t that great?

Some updates were made to Foller.me last night, you can view those at the semi-public beta over here: beta.foller.me – recent queries are now working, completely changed the stopwords removal algorithm (works much faster) and changed the linking structure. You can see now that the tags in the recent @mentions section link to their profiles on Foller.me. The tag cloud builder was also optimized, people with few tweets now look not worse than @cnn ;)

Also, I’ve finally managed to get a grid-service hosting account from Media Temple. Moved the blog and the beta over to the new place this morning and everything seems to work just great! They’ve got a well-structured control panel by the way, I really loved it.

The Firefox and IE search plugins are done and work fine, though we’re not releasing those public before the actual public beta release of Foller.me (domain conflicts). The release date of the first public beta is set to be 1st of June. Hope we do not overdue :)

Thanks for all your support everyone and keep your suggestions coming!

I have some good news and some bad news. Let’s start with the bad news – bug reports (perhaps they aren’t that bad, as we haven’t launched yet). No languages supported other than English. Well as far as I know TweetDeck for instance, doesn’t support anything but English yet, so that’s not THAT big of a problem. And our databases run under utf8, so that’ll be fixed in no time ;) We promise!

Good news. There are three medium-scale hosting companies willing to support our project and offer their services for free in exchange for an add opportunity on Foller.me, but unfortunatelly not all of them provide cloud or grid hosting. Anyway that shouldn’t be much of a problem for the first month or so. Haven’t made a final decision yet and still digging through other hosting companies. We’ll let you know whever we decide.

And here are a couple of good suggestions and ideas from within the team and Twitter responces.

• Include a “User tweets since …” label to know how long the user has been on Twitter
• Correct the clouds sizing ration for tweeps that have more than 3-5 general topics they tweet about
• Average Tweets per day rate for a particular user
• Firefox plugin for quick access to Foller.me
• WordPress widget for a “My Twitter Topics” block in the sidebar
• Public API for any other developers out there to help develop upon Foller.me

Thanks for all the ideas friends, and keep them coming! You’re great!
Cheers.

Yieks! The beta is now available for everyone to run some tests: beta.foller.me! Please don’t misuse this cause we’ve only got 100 API calls per hour. Still waiting for responce from Twitter.

Post all your thoughts, suggestions, bug reports and everything else in comments to this thread. Need as much as possible before going wide-public! Thanks everyone!

The beta has been fine. The design is almost ready. The blog theme is under development (I like this white one meanwhile). Now, the hosting. Honestly, I don’t know what I’m looking for. I have no idea what I need and I can’t even imagine how much people will visit the website every day. It maybe 10, it may be 100,000. Anybody good at start-up calculation? ;)

It’s currently hosted in Moscow, Russia, but that’s definitely NOT the way it should be. Twitter API calls from Russia to CA, USA takes quite some time, that’s why I was thinking about hosting somewhere in California. Maybe not California, but it HAS to be US for sure! I looked at various hosting plans, shared, VPS, and dedicated servers, there are loads of companies that suit my needs. But I’m worried about pricing. Not sure I’d want to spend a bunch of money on dedicated hosting if we’ll have 10 visits per day for the first few weeks.

So, the final part is that I’m looking for some hosting company that would sponsor the foller.me project in exchange for advertising opportunities on foller.me ;) I know that this doesn’t sound right, but there SHOULD be one ready to help. Any ideas?

Okay, so the beta is up and everything seems to be okay, apart from the part where we run out of Twitter API calls per hour. Cache? Yeah, there is cache and right now it’s set to cache similar queries, but they get outdated after 60 seconds. I’ll increase that number to an hour or two, depending on server average load.

For those of you who don’t know the URL of the beta (alpha, or whatever you wanna call it) please contact me on Twitter. I’m @kovshenin. I’ll need your feedback in comments BTW.

Hey there. Well, I’ve nothing to write here yet, though there’s quite a lot going on behind the scenes right now. You might be wondering what’s this all about. I’ll explain it in only a few words, okay? Take me for example. I’ve have around 20 new followers per day on Twitter. I really love to follow back, but I don’t follow back everyone, because I wouldn’t like spamish stuff going on in my Friends Timeline.

How do I decide? Well, honestly.. I open up my Inbox, browse through every profile of a new follower I get. I look at his bio, and I look at his 20 recent tweets. It takes me quite a long time to run through all 20 per day. And what about fridays? I can get around 30-50 on a friday, and that’s even more time-consuming.

So, I’ve decided to create a Twitter service, that would save you (and me) all that time. Tag clouds! You all know tag clouds, don’t you? So what if you had a tag cloud version of some tweep, generated from his latest 200-300 tweets? That’d be great wouldn’t it?

Anyway, there’s a lot more to this service than just a tag cloud of tweets. We’re currently pending API extension approval from Twitter to get 20,000 API calls per hour and testing an alpha (or beta) version of foller.me.

Have a good day.