Twitter followers removed

For about a year we have had a feature that showed you how many followers you had in Twitter, and it was integrated nicely into the stats. This data is provided by a third party, TwitterCounter.com. As that service has grown a lot, the data has become somewhat unreliable because they can only hit twitter's API so many times in a day. With probably more than a million people checking their follower history on that site, they just can't update every person's follower count every day, so some of the data becomes stuck or out of date.

We have plenty of experience with Twitter's API ourselves, and the limits on their API can be very frustrating. This has also lead our own Twitter Analytics feature to become less reliable than it used to be, with most searches only being updated once or twice per day rather than every 30 minutes as it used to be. Don't worry, we are about to fix this by distributing the load for our API hits across 4 servers so we can do 4 times as many per day.

Anyways, I'm not putting the service down in anyway (I know the owner - Hi Boris!) but the problem is that this feature leads to a TON of support emails to us, and that takes a lot of our time. With this being completely out of our control, it no longer makes sense for us to have this feature. So as of today, it is no more.

I'm sorry, I know a lot of people liked it, but I hope you understand why we are doing this. We may code this feature ourselves in the future if enough people want it back.

14 comments | Jan 06 2010 12:34pm

Reader Comments

bring it back!

-support@lytico.com
http://www.lytico.com

Lytico Jan 06 2010 12:55pm

Most of my clients are dropping their twitter accounts anyway, but it is a cool feature for those who use it. It's certainly a good selling point. Just my thought.

travis@interactive-md.com Jan 06 2010 1:23pm

No big loss. There are other sites that do that for us.

WackyLabs Jan 06 2010 1:34pm

I thought Twitter just updated their API rate limits by a huge amount.

Shouldn't that alleviate the problems?

brant Jan 06 2010 1:52pm

You could use PHP with file_get_contents and get the twitter count value once a day, without going with Twitter API.

DJ NightLife Jan 06 2010 2:39pm

Sorry for the pitch, but my company has a solution. We track Twitter followers at StatsMix (http://www.statsmix.com). We're still in beta, but submit your beta request on the StatsMix site if interested and I'll try to get you in as fast as possible.

Tom Markiewicz Jan 06 2010 6:51pm

sad day :-(

Mark Valenzuela Jan 07 2010 10:23am

very sad day, http://www.ramgad.com

jmu Jan 07 2010 3:36pm

Tom Markiewicz, Sean doesn't need a Twitter stats service, he needs an industrial strength Twitter stats service with 100 racks of servers. You need to be more specific about what you have to offer.

mark Jan 08 2010 1:46am

Travis has clients dropping their Twitter accounts? Probably not the best of decision for them heading into 2010, talk them out of that!!!!

Brant, I believe Twitter is upping their API to 1500, but they have not done it yet. This should boost some creativity on the part of developers and make some fresh things happen this year.

Happy New Year everybody!

LOVE IT!

Harrison

Harrison Painter Jan 08 2010 9:37am

To clarify, Twitter has many different APIs, all of which have different restrictions. But they all have restrictions.

For our Twitter Analytics feature, use the Search API. They don't document the restrictions on this (they explicitly state this in their docs). We're not sure why they do that but anyways, from our testing it appears the average IP address can do about 1,000 search API requests per hour. They have a submission process for getting white listed for the search API to vastly raise this limit, but they denied our application. Even when we offered $1,000 per month for it. Hello, Twitter - wouldn't this be a good business model?

Sean (Clicky) Jan 08 2010 3:59pm

I think I'll weigh in here - apologies for the length of this post. There are four services I use regularly, two free and two paid. The free ones are Google Analytics and Twitalyzer. I only use Google Analytics because it integrates with Twitalyzer - otherwise I'd just stick with Clicky, because I don't think it's any of Google's business what my web stats are as long as I'm not using their advertising-based tools.

Twitalyzer gives me follower counts and lots of metrics. It's free, and they have a very nifty book on how to build up a Twitter presence using their metrics. Eric T. Peterson is the brains behind it, and he's a recognized guru in web analytics. So, I don't need follower counts from Clicky - I get those and lots more meaningful and actionable Twitter metrics from Twitalzyer.

On to the paid services. I'm using Clicky, of course. I use Clicky primarily because it's real-time, and because it's slightly easier to set up than Google Analytics. And interpreting the Clicky metrics is *way* easier than Google Analytics. I do use the Clicky Twitter monitoring, but mostly because of the way it's integrated with the web analytics, links, etc. And I've used the Clicky link shortener, but still use bit.ly most of the time because it's integrated with Twitter and with the Twitalzyer - Google Analytics pathway.

The other paid service I use is ViralHeat. On the Twitter side, it somewhat duplicates the Clicky Twitter monitoring, although location-based searches work with ViralHeat and I don't think they do with Clicky. The thing ViralHeat gives me that Clicky doesn't is monitoring of web sites and videos in addition to Twitter. And the ViralHeat dashboards are nice. I'm planning to stay with them at least for the first quarter of this year.

So the one thing that would make me really happy would be Clicky integration with Twitalyzer. Then I could walk away from Google Analytics, pull their WordPress plugin, and live Google-free. If you could duplicate ViralHeat's video and web site monitoring capabilities, I might drop them, but they have a few other selling points. For example, they're free for non-profits. If I did some pro-bono work for a non-profit, I'd use Google Analytics, Twitalzyer and ViralHeat.

Ed Borasky Jan 08 2010 11:13pm

Please please bring it back!!!!

Annabel - www.lovemydress.net Jan 17 2010 11:41am

My workaround for the irregular updates was manually hitting TwitterCounter and triggering an update - which I'm happy to continue doing. Any way we can have this feature reactivated on request? You could always show a warning when people activate the feature that tells them they need to manually trigger updates.

Tim Hanlon Jan 19 2010 3:19pm

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