Half a million reasons to be proud

tweetrollWhen was the last time you built something that was used half a million times? Well, @HyderJ and I built a widget for Twitter a few weeks ago and this evening we’ve reached the grand total of 500,000 widgets served. The widget let’s people show how many followers and friends they have on their blog or website and also shows some avatars of people you are following. It’s quite attractive and you can see it in the sidebar of this blog. Welcome to TweetRoll.

The data is provided by Twitter’s API and the call can be a bit expensive (takes a few seconds to get a response). For this reason, the results are cached for quick response. The caching also helps the widget scale better and minimises the number of API calls the site makes ensuring we don’t hit any API limits.  Our peak usage so far was around 60-70 widget calls per minute and our server hardly registered any load, so we’re happy that we should be able to take on a dramatically increase load. Bring on!

Time to crack out out our Mizuno drivers and celebrate by sinking a few on the golf course. Well, actually we have lots of plans for Tweetburn, so maybe I’ll just stay in coding huh? By the way, have you noticed that you can now change your size and colours and personalise the tagline on the widget?

9 people commented!

  1. Nickop says:
    February 11, 2009 at 6:37 pm

    Awesome stuff Owen. If you ever fancy a round of golf I am up for it.

  2. Moira Heath says:
    February 12, 2009 at 10:55 am

    Owen, is it possible to put TweetRoll on my Facebook profile?

  3. Owen says:
    February 12, 2009 at 11:04 am

    @Moira: Hmm .. off to find out

  4. daria369 says:
    February 12, 2009 at 11:22 am

    I’m using it and love it and I’m very happy for your success!! – have yet to check into the customizable stuff, though

  5. Lisa says:
    February 12, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    I love that I rank high in the stats program. LOL

  6. Owen says:
    February 12, 2009 at 4:05 pm

    @Lisa: I’m so sorry, but someone’s knocked you off the top spot!

  7. Dana says:
    February 28, 2009 at 8:22 am

    I was surfing around and came across the “Change the Web Challenge” http://www.socialactions.com/changetheweb and thought you might want to submit TweetRoll into the contest. Grand prize is $5000 which would come in handy for your newest family members on the way. Congratulations on your new babies and good luck if you decide to enter this contest.

Trackbacks

  1. Three of the best that caught our eye this week | CREATE. says:
    February 13, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    [...] a million reasons to be proud – Owen and his friend have been developing a new widget called Tweetroll that has now been downloaded [...]

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