Have you ever wondered if it was worth following someone on Twitter?
Now you have another tool to help you make that decision: follow cost. Give follow cost a Twitter user name and it will calculate how often they tweet on average. As a yard stick, follow cost uses the milliscoble, defined as 1/1000th of the average daily Twitter output of Robert Scoble. As an example, here’s my follow cost (currently, 133 milliscobles).
There’s even a bookmarklet you can use when viewing a Twitter profile.
We’ve got some neat features planned for the future, but to do them, we need better hosting. So we’re looking for a sponsor. Contact me if you’re interested.
Building follow cost
I built follow cost with my friend (and Harvest developer) Barry Hess. The idea for a service “to tell you how annoying someone would be to follow on Twitter” was hatched on our road trip to Windy City Rails a few weeks ago. (Fourteen hours in a van with 6 programmers is a long, long time.)
Barry and I decided that we wanted to do something a little different than the traditional Rails project.
We chose to use Sinatra. Sinatra was perfect for this project. It has very few dependencies. The routing is explicit and an integral part of your app. The app itself has only a few pages and doesn’t use a database. Really, anything else would be overkill.
We also decided to use jQuery for JavaScript, since neither of us had tried it before. It worked well, I can see why people like it.
To actually power the application, we call the Twitter API (using REXML) and the Twitter Search API (using JSON).
To keep things snappy, we implemented a page caching system for Sinatra that works very similarly to Twistr’s, which I described earlier.
Deployment was handled with Passenger and Rack based on these instructions.
