Analytics Expert Blog

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on that site, they just can’t update every person’s follower count every day, so some of the data becomes stuck or out of date.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.