OpenIdea: TwitterCounter.com
During the Kings of Code event two weeks ago I was talking about Twitter with someone. He mentioned how many followers he had and I mentioned my number of followers. He was impressed with my number of followers and I felt a moment of pride. Then I suggested that this number might become significant one day as it says as much about someone as pageviews or RSS feeds. If I come to a blog and see they have 10.000 rss feed subscribers I take their opinion more serious than if they have 10 feed subscribers.
The same works for Twitter. When I see people on Twitter with more followers than I have than I’m interested to find out why. What do they tweet and who are they? During that same conversation I said that it probably wouldn’t be long before a Feedburner for Twitter would arise that would start tracking the follower count for people.
Right after that conversation I opened my laptop and started checking out names for this project. Twitterburner.com was gone and FeedTwitter.com didn’t make sense so I came it with TwitterCounter.com. The domain was available and I registered it that same day.
Then I got distracted with other stuff until early last week. The subject came up at the office and I asked around who would have time to develop the idea. Everybody is pretty busy and we decided it wasn’t a high priority project and we would postpone it until later.
The next day however the idea was still buzzing in my head and I decided to do some sketches in PHP to see how difficult it would be to built it. Within a few hours I had a basic site and some scripts that sort of worked. I worked until 2am in the morning on Tuesday and then the whole day on Wednesday. On Tuesday I arrived at the office and asked Sander and Arjen to help me with a few details. Sander fixed my database (MySQL) and Arjen spent some time fixing a few algorithms.
during lunch that day Ernst-Jan asked me if I would be ready to launch TwitterCounter.com on Monday. I smiled and said ‘Why not just launch now’. So we did.
This is what the site currently says:
TwitterCounter: How popular are you? (open beta)
TwitterCounter is a service for Bloggers, Social networkers and other well connected individuals to communicate and track the number of followers they have on Twitter. Add the TwitterCounter to your blog or profile to attract more followers. Also check out our top 100 and add your own name too!
After we launched Ernst-Jan published a short review on The Next Web Blog and I twittered it. That was enough to start an avalanche of blogposts, tweets and traffic to TwitterCounter.com. The service has been reviewed on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and made it to the front page of Del.icio.us where it stayed for hours.
The most exciting thing though has been the huge adoption of the TwitterCounter at hundreds of blogs all over the world. Here are some randomscreenshots (+ links) to a few blogs displaying the TwitterCounter:
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8 Responses to “OpenIdea: TwitterCounter.com”
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This idea is excellent. I followed what you did on twitter and what happened on the net. Once again great ideas can spread out faster then anyone can imaging.
Keep on generating stuff like this!
[...] Velthuijzen van Zanten is een bezig bijtje en dat blijkt ook weer uit zijn laatste project; TwitterCounter. TwitterCounter moet voor Twitter worden wat Feedburner is voor RSS. Waar het [...]
Question: do you take a newspaper with circulation 900k more serious than one with 300k? Do you take an artist that sells enough tickets for a stadium more serious than one filling Paradiso? I don’t!
Hi Erwin: How about a newspaper with a circulation of just 3 or an artist with an audience of only 5?
If the audience is TOO small (which depends on the situation) then I do take that as a negative sign. More comments on a blog is a good sign. More feedreaders too and more followers on Twitter too.
Less can be more but not always is.
The artists that have influenced me most haven’t sold more than 1000 records. The persons that have influenced me most have a real small audience.
But don’t get me wrong, i like Twittercounter ;-) and open innovation!
Don’t get ME wrong. I’m not saying that a blogger with no readers, no RSS subscribers and no followers on Twitter won’t have anything interesting to say.
My point is just that I would wonder why that is. If you have something interesting to say, in general (not a rule) you will attract an audience. Which also means that people with an audience often have something interesting to say.
He Erwin,
The counter is great for you. Now you can choose, when you see a blogger has a large audience on twittercounter do not bother to read it. Check out the bloggers whith less followers.
What I would like to see is what are the heavy growers, from 50 to 100 twitter followers in a few days. Combine this with summize so you can track twitter people on a seartain toppick.
And then make a new twitter user that makes posts every day from the fast growers (on a toppick). Just an idea…
Congratulations!!
It always feels good to have an idea and watch it come to life…. I haven’t done anything as cool as taht yet though..
Keep up the good work.