Foller.me: Almost Ready to Remove the Beta Label

With a few core changes to Foller.me (hope you noticed the performance tuning) we’re almost ready to remove the beta label. I wrote on Twitter a few weeks ago that the beta label will be removed in September, so here we are. I’m not sure if it means anything to you, but it does mean a lot to me. You see, a product in beta is used with caution most of the time, that’s what I do. I like to play with betas but I don’t actually use them (except for Yahoo! Pipes and others of course). I think there’s something similar between the words “beta” and “startup”, so yes, I’d like to show the world that we’re stable. No glitches, no more server reboots and ready for massive hi-destructive traffic (thank you Amazon EC2!).

A few words about the core changes. We improved our caching mechanism – the relations are now being cached for no longer than one day. They’re used when generating the followers map, while the topics, mentions and hashtags clouds cache for only an hour. Same caching now applies to the Foller.me API, besides, client-side caching is always welcome. This has speeded up our overall performance and it seems to be running smooth for the past few weeks.

The Foller.me API though is still being improved. We’re coming up with a few more feature improvements to the REST API, most of them will involve styling the clouds and we’re also working on a few more examples to show you how to get the most out of the API goodies.

The beta label removal date hasn’t been announced yet, but we’re thinking September (you know, in Russia kids go to school 1st of September each year, so we’re hoping that their parents buy them brand new PCs and of course a broadband internet connection, therefore kids will discover Twitter and hopefully Foller.me ;).

Thank you for all your support and good luck!

Update: Foller.me is still beta ;) just not yet .. (12/22/09)