Hey, it’s been a while now, tonnes of work going on here. I’d just like to give you a little update on what seems to be coming up for Foller.me. Our API has made quite a good job, it’s been included in a few (not so popular) open source libraries, and as I wrote earlier we’ve got an Adobe AIR application almost ready to be released, hopefully this month. We’re also investigating Facebook as a platform and as I mentioned in my personal blog (Facebook API Experiments: Twitter Tags) we’re working on a profile and/or fanpage application tab that will be called “Twitter Tags” powered by our API.

P.S. Thank you for all the shoutouts and suggestions on Twitter, we’re watching those.

~ @kovshenin

We’re glad to announce that we’re getting a desktop app developed by Denis Volokh using Adobe AIR. It’s called the Foller.me Lite, which is a lightweight version of Foller.me but with a few extra features that aren’t yet implemented on the main website. This is just a teaser and the download will be available soon. Meanwhile, take a look at these screenshots:

We investigated profiles that turned out as 404 errors at Foller.me while existing and publicly open on Twitter. They are not the case. The reason is actually us, we keep hitting 502 errors while working with the Twitter API. I’m not sure what’s causing this, the docs say “Twitter is overloaded” but it’s been going on for two days now.

We applied for whitelisting our IP addresses and Twitter account at the API before we even started the coding, and received approval from Twitter. It seems though that our IP address has changed recently, therefore we’re hitting the limit rates again. We submitted a ticket for a refresh of our whitelisting.

I hope that solves the issue.

Cheers,
~ @kovshenin

Oooh! The Foller.me API is finally up and running, and already documented here: Foller.me API. We’re anticipating and eagerly waiting for your first widgets, gadget apps and plug-ins developed with the Foller.me API. A great example that is already being used by some blogs is the Foller.me powered widget for WordPress developed by none other than @kovshenin. This simple widget uses the Foller.me API to load up the latest Twitter messages for a specified user, simple and nice eh?

If you have developed or trying to develop some interesting Foller.me API-based tool – let us know. If you have any questions or suggestions – let us know. Let us know about yourself so we can let the world know about you :)

~ by @SoulSeekah

Err, I’m not sure why we haven’t done this in the first place, but anyway, the documentation is now located at api.foller.me (yes, it still redirects to PBWorks, but perhaps we’d like our own address some day ;)

We’ve also sent out two requests to ProgrammableWeb.com as a Mashup and an API, hoping to get aproval.

~ @kovshenin

Hey there, I’ve got a few announcements for you today, the first and biggest one is (as you already understood from the title of this post) – the API has been released! Wohooo! Yes, you can now develop your own apps, widgets, gadgets, plugins getting the most out of Foller.me. The API is public, free, no application required, no API key required, totally open to the world! Also, you’ll be so surprised at how simple it is! Take a look at the Foller.me API Documentation Wiki.

Now, the other announcements is that we’ve simplified the relations crawler, as there was no need to show 200,000 maps points, so we’re basically back down to ~ 500. We just thought that nobody would go through all the pages of @mashable’s followers geo locations ;)

And we’ve also shutdown the followers insight section that was released a few weeks ago. Those numbers just make no sense, and hey, we’re trying to keep Foller.me as simple as possible, and we do believe that it’s your apps and widgets that will help us grow together and hopefully take down that [beta] label next month!

P.S. We’re working on a WordPress Foller.me widget, and will release it under the GPL license. Just to give you a simple example of how it may work ;)

Good luck and happy coding!

~ @kovshenin

Hey everyone! I’m very glad that most of you are loving and actually using our service, this makes us wanna move on. We had a lot of talk about Followers Geography lately. It seems that you people are very excited about that part and here’s the good news. Yes, we will extend it, fact. Not only are we removing the 500 map points restriction (yup, we sorted things out with the Google API and we’re now able to display any amount of points on that map) and, of course, integrating the new pagination system, but we’ve also got a little surprise up our sleeve ;)

Also, the Foller.me API is on its way together with the Foller.me Widget for WordPress, and we’ve got another little feature coming up that I’ll keep secret for now. I’ll just say that it has something to do with Follow Fridays ;) and it will be totally fun!

I won’t post any deadlines because we never know how much time it may take to come up with something new (we’re working for free here, remember? ;)

Stay tuned tweeps!
~ @kovshenin

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.

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.