Posts Tagged ‘startup’
August 26th, 2009
With a few core changes to Foller.me (hope you noticed the performance tuning) we’re almost ready to remove the beta label. I wrote on Twitter a few weeks ago that the beta label will be removed in September, so here we are. I’m not sure if it means anything to you, but it does mean a lot to me. You see, a product in beta is used with caution most of the time, that’s what I do. I like to play with betas but I don’t actually use them (except for Yahoo! Pipes and others of course). I think there’s something similar between the words “beta” and “startup”, so yes, I’d like to show the world that we’re stable. No glitches, no more server reboots and ready for massive hi-destructive traffic (thank you Amazon EC2!).
Foller.me is Almost Ready for Action
A few words about the core changes. We improved our caching mechanism – the relations are now being cached for no longer than one day. They’re used when generating the followers map, while the topics, mentions and hashtags clouds cache for only an hour. Same caching now applies to the Foller.me API, besides, client-side caching is always welcome. This has speeded up our overall performance and it seems to be running smooth for the past few weeks.
The Foller.me API though is still being improved. We’re coming up with a few more feature improvements to the REST API, most of them will involve styling the clouds and we’re also working on a few more examples to show you how to get the most out of the API goodies.
The beta label removal date hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re thinking September (you know, in Russia kids go to school 1st of September each year, so we’re hoping that their parents buy them brand new PCs and of course a broadband internet connection, therefore kids will discover Twitter and hopefully Foller.me ;).
Thank you for all your support and good luck!
Update: Foller.me is still beta ;) just not yet .. (12/22/09)
June 15th, 2009
StartupsLive.tv is definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen around these days and guess what! I got there!
Startups Live is the non-biased platform for any startup to get live exposure, a captive audience, and valuable feedback from potential business partners, customers, members, and investors.
Foller me on Twitter and I'll Foller Back
I sent a request to Startups Live asking them to feature the Foller.me Twitter service I’ve created and bang! I got on the show! It was really amazing, I’ve never seen anything like it!
The girls are so wonderful! Charissa was the one interviewing me and Dannie took care of the promo and blog post. We had so much fun during the live recording, that we couldn’t stop reading the Foller.me profiles after the show, so if you missed the live version, you’ll never get to see what happened beyond the recorded version at Ustream.tv, sorry!
I was very nervous on the show, but Charissa and Dannie said that I never showed that (hope that this is true), although when I played back the recorded version and looked at myself, I kinda laughed. Do I really look that funny on TV? And the panda, oh that was weird, wasn’t it ;) but I couldn’t help it! Then, when Charissa asked me about the business model of Foller.me, wow! I didn’t know what to say, cause I haven’t really thought about that (much).
The guests in the chatroom during the show were amazing too, especially when we started reading their Foller.me profiles out loud, heh that was fun! And my brand-new-to-twitter brother @SoulSeekah got his one-minute celebrity spotlight on the show too, thanks for that girls!
Anyway, if you’ve missed the show, I feel terribly sorry for you! So go ahead and watch (at least) the recorded version on Startups Live. You won’t regret it.
Don’t forget to follow the girls on Twitter: Charissa Cowart and Dannie McClain. And definitely follow Startups Live on Twitter for the hottest news. Oh, I almost forgot, they have a Startups Live Facebook group. I suggest you join that too ;)
June 1st, 2009
I’m glad to announce that Foller.me has launched today!! Hurray! We’ve already got some cool articles, shoutouts and tweets about the start, and more to (hopefully) come this night. Actually, some of them were written yesterday – timezones issue I guess.
Anyway, we’ve reached our first goal yesterday night – 1000 unique profile views and most of our first few fans are very excited about The Foller.me Rundown which has been launched a couple of days ago.
The public version is available right over here: foller.me and you might also be interested in the blog: blog.foller.me. Thanks for all your support guys, we wouldn’t have done this without you, and YES, keep it up, because we’ve got plenty of surprizes coming to Foller.me this month, including a Greasemonkey script to inject Foller.me directly into Twitter, a WordPress widget and..
Oh yeah.. Totally forgot.. YES. A new section called Followers Geography! Yes, we are going to digest all your followers and spread them out on a Google Map! We’re running a few more tests on the developers version of Foller.me to make sure we have no problems with the Twitter and Google API limits. I will definitely announce once it’s public, so stay tuned!
For the latest Foller.me information you might consider following @follerme on Twitter.
May 28th, 2009
Good news everyone! We’re totally ready to launch! Everything is going as planned right now and we’re having a very busy weekend, but the launch date was announced and there’s nothing we can do to stop ;)
Might I start with a little press release? You can post this wherever you want, blogs, forums, chats, … newspapers, TV, radio ;) but please, schedule that for Monday (1st of June), okay?
Houston, We're Ready for Take-off!
Foller.me is a new third-party Twitter service that renders instant detailed information about a particular Twitter user’s latest 200 posts. It would generally take hours of scouting and pulling together information from hundreds of posts to scrape up some sort of insight into the user’s topic interests on Twitter. Foller.me does this in a flash, providing 3 tag clouds which represent the user’s key topics on Twitter.
How does it work? Foller.me gets access to the profile of a user via the Twitter API, scanning all the public info and his/her latest 200 tweets. It builds up three tag clouds: topics, #hashtags and @mentions, based on the user’s recent activity, excluding all stop words.
Let’s say you’ve received 20 new followers today and you cannot decide whether to follow back or not. You do NOT have the time to read 200 tweets on each of them, right? Nevertheless, you can’t just follow everyone, since you’ll get unwanted tweets in your friends timeline. Here’s the key: take a peek at ther Foller.me profiles and you’re done!
More information at foller.me
Blog at blog.foller.me
Cheers!
The beta version is still alive, but I’ll shoot that one down on Sunday. Everything’s set and almost working on foller.me! By the way, there’s a fairly simple way to access the functionality before the actual release, so if you can’t wait, go ahead, but we’re not removing the “beta” label until we’re settled ;)
I added an OpenSearch plugin for Foller.me. To add it to your web browser (Firefox or IE7) just visit Foller.me and take a look at your searchbox. It should indicate (lights up blue in FF3) that there’s a new search plugin available. Click on the drop-down list and select Foller.me. Anyway, I’m not sure that this would be enough, I mean wouldn’t it be nicer if there was a little button in your Firefox statusbar that you could click and input a name? Your thoughts on this one.
May 25th, 2009
Twitter API Experiments
Hello everyone. You might be wondering why I haven’t updated my WordPress plugins for the last two weeks. I was very busy with this new Twitter service I got in mind and I’m proud to announce that a semi-public beta is already up and running. You might want to read the blog before you go test: blog.foller.me. The beta’s located here: beta.foller.me. I’m really looking forward to your comments, bug reports, suggestions and any other kind of feedback.
Planning to launch officially (still with a beta logo though) next week or perhaps the week after if everything goes wrong. Still looking for suitable hosting services in the US (currently hosted in Moscow, Russia).
Thanks.
