FW Updates

As of late I haven't done much with FollowWatch. Since the initial 1000 invites ran out, there's been a growing list of people waiting to use the service. A few days into the queue, 200 invites were sent, and a few days later 100 more invites were sent. Given Twitter's recent growing pains, it makes more sense to hold off on giving out more invites as Twitter's stability corresponds with the application's ability to do its job and simply put less users on our end while Twitter works their issues out leads to better stability for Twitter and consequently, better stability for the app.

Today saw some intermittent issues with updates getting sent out. What appears to be the issue either returning an empty or incomplete list of your followers during one stat run and giving the right stats on another stat run. This filled the database with changes like duplicate added/lost followers as well as reporting followers you already had as added followers. Cleared out all that information, and not sure if the API is acting correctly now or still giving trouble.

I read a tweet regarding the invite system that states the following: "Artificial scarcity to improve perceived authority?" First, scarcity is definitely not artificial. We can only query the user information of about 20,000 users in an hour. That means, 20,000 unique names can be looked up that get listed in the gained/dropped column. But even that's not completely true because of Twitter's speed & load issues, which make looking up 4,000 names more often than not take as long as 30 minutes to process. There are real limitations to keep the service flowing and opening the flood gates would quickly debilitate it and make it as unreliable to those using it as Qwitter turned out to be. Secondly, there is no attempt to be perceived as an authority of any sort on follower stats. Whipping up a service of similar fashion to this one shouldn't pose difficult for anyone. It took me a matter of 5 days from concept to site launch, may take you even less.

Finally I don't appreciate people berating me with negative comments because they haven't received an invite yet. This is an add-on service to twitter provided by me as a personal courtesy. This is a hobby not business. And the more you make it feel like business, the more I think about closing the whole queue process off and just inviting people at whim from my personal account.

I also wanted to note: changing your username disrupts your stats if you're already registered, and changing your username before you get an invite from the queue will end up getting you bumped off the queue when your invite is delivered/attempts to get sent out.