Who are you on Twitter?
Allow us to connect to youraccount = more cool features.
We started TwitterCounter in June 12, 2008 and it took until April 21, 2009 before we started writing this About page. Before that we spent almost all our time adding cool features and making sure the service would scale. If you have any questions about TwitterCounter that aren't detailed here feel free to email us!
Twittecounter is looking for a full time PHP developer.
What we are looking for:
On May 27, 2008 we organized a conference in Amsterdam titled Kings of Code. At that event Arjen Schat (co-founder) and I (Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten) were talking to a reader of The Next Web blog. I asked this person if he was subscribed to our RSS feed. he told us 'No, I follow you on Twitter and that works better for me than RSS". I was amazed and when he walked away I turned to Arjen and said "If more people are going to follow us via Twitter instead of via RSS then we have to build Feedburner for Twitter!". Arjen agreed but told me he didn't have time to start on it right away.
Knowing a little PHP myself I decided to spend my weekend trying to come up with a prototype. After one weekend I had a simple website but most things didn't work yet. The weekend after that (June 7 & 8) I solved most of the tough issues (like generating images with GD) and on Monday June 9 I showed a working prototype to my partners.
Arjen loved the idea from the start and we agree to work on it for a few weeks and launch it quickly. We dropped what we were doing and started polishing the service. Only 2 days later we decided that TwitterCounter, as basic as it was, was good enough to launch. So we did.
On June 12, 2008 we launched the site and Ernst-Jan wrote a post about us on TheNextWeb.com announcing the service. The title was "TwitterCounter: Feedburner for Twitter". The first TwitterCounter badge was really ugly, as you can see on the right here. But we updated it quickly and people all around the web started adding them to their blogs. That first month (June 2008) we displayed 3,7 million buttons. In our second month, July 2008, we displayed 11,8 million buttons and in August we displayed 18,6 million buttons. March 2009 was the first month when we displayed more than 100 million buttons in one month.
On February 12, 2009 we launched a new widget called TwitterRemote. You can see one in the sidebar here on the right. Just as TwitterCounter could be described as Feedburner for Twitter you could say that TwitterRemote is like MyBlogLog for Twitter. It shows you which Twitter users visit your site or blog. We displayed 2,9 million TwitterRemote widgets in February, 6,8 Million in March and 7,8 million in April 2009.
We are a self funded startup based in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and love to hear from our users. Let us know how you feel about TwitterCounter and TwitterRemote and what extra features or improvements you would like to see.
Oh, and follow us on twitter! @Boris & @ArjenSchat
Guy Kawasaki
Bijan Sabet
Steve Rubel
