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.