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’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

Good news! We’ve just released a handy bookmarklet for quick access to Foller.me while viewing profiles on Twitter.com! Just drag the bird below onto your bookmarks and enjoy! Clicking the bookmarklet while viewing a Twitter profile will take you directly to that user’s Foller.me profile.

Oh, and if you have any problems with that, please report to this page: Bug Reports. Thanks.

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…