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 comments

  1. 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.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.