Mashable.com’s Spark of Genius series covered Foller.me as part of their Microsoft BizSpark Project which showcases a promising new software company, and finds the unique feature that separates it from the competition every week.

Mashable’s author Adam Ostrow, “Editor in Chief at Mashable, responsible for the editorial management and direction of one of the most widely read blogs in the world, covering the latest technologies, trends, and individuals that are driving the current evolution of the Web”, posted a Foller.me review yesterday covering the aspects, features and advantages of our Twitter tool.

The full review can be read here: Foller.me Tells You All About Twitter Users @ Mashable.com

We got a few eye-opening comments and are intending to work hard on implementing several crucial additions before removing the Beta label.

We would like to thank everyone for the support, especially Adam Ostrow.

~ @SoulSeekah

Yes, finally, Foller.me has reached yet another level of development; a well-deserved “Beta 3″ tag has been placed to mark the beginning of new work stages. Foller.me is now running in the last beta stage (we hope) before we take off that nasty label.

The improvements that have been made from Beta 2 are:

1. The Followers Geography is running stable, and loses it’s beta tag thanks to the efficient Google Maps API.
2. A new Followers Rate section has been added, which displays a profile’s followers growth rate. Big shout-outs go to @boris from TwitterCounter.
3. You can now follow a profile directly from Foller.me via OAuth; no need for your Twitter username or password. Simply click “allow” and viola.
4. Collapsible/expandable sections are now personalized via cookies (finally)!
5. The Foller.me Rundown (@fmrd) has been optimized after a critical fail, when we tweeted the rundown once every minute during an hour via @fmrd a few days ago.
6. A major improvement in caching has been made.

There’s still much to be done. All ideas, comments and suggestions are always appreciated. :)

~ @SoulSeekah

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

Well what do you know? Amazon’s EC2 works like magic for Foller.me and a few great updates are already here.

As promised, the Foller.me Followers Geography Beta 2 is here. The 500 followers limit has been lifted thanks to the new relations crawler. Now all the followers are spread on a restructured and paginated map.

A new Followers insight table give you a quick overview of the Foller.me Profile’s followers. This new level of depth (‘the followers’ followers’) is represented in the form of statistical data, which can help you assess the overall quality of the profile’s followers – the amount of updates, and the followers of the latter). This is just a basic representation and we are working on a graphical interface with much more in-depth and complex information.

Foller.me rundown has moved over to @fmrd and now with a little surprise for tweeps that get 1st place every 12 hours.

Thank you for being with us and witnessing the evolution of Foller.me. Stay tuned for more updates by following @follerme. Questions, suggestions and ideas – appreciated.

~ @SoulSeekah

Hey everyone. I know you’ve been waiting for this moment and due to hard work this weekend we’ve managed to release the Followers Geography beta to the public, hence the announcement, although you might have already noticed it working yesterday evening (there’ve been a few tweets too ;)

Anyway, this Followers-on-a-map thing isn’t going to stop at 500 (current limitation) followers. We’re taking this a step further in the upcoming months and hopefully give you a full working Geo-based Tweeting Machine.

Check out Followers Geography in the Foller.me Extend section for more information.

Wohoo! Foller.me is now officially declared open for public! Hurry! Call your friends! Call your friends’ friends! And their friends too :)

Yes, everything’s going according to plan, and we’re releasing a couple of more features this month after we beta test on our development version. Our next goal is 5000 unique profile views, then perhaps 10,000 and after that.. Well I guess we’ll go top-secret, for many reasons (no, not for advertising ones).

Hope you all have a great day and enjoy your stay at Foller.me!

P.S. Thanks to everyone who has somehow commited to the project, and we’ll be sure to give you shoutouts later this week. Keep the suggestions coming, tweeps, you’re great!

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’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!

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!