Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 3rd March 2009
3 COMMENTS 
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
As a regular reader of The Next Web Blog you already know all there is to know about TwitterCounter. But there are millions of people who haven’t heard about it yet and Chris Pirilo (@chrispirillo, 40.000 followers!) decided to dedicate a whole show to explaining, and showing, what TwitterCounter is. We don’t generally like blowing our own horn but love it when other people do.
Check it out:
Written on 11th February 2009
78 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
Working TwitterRemote example:
At The Next Web Blog we love to report on what the future of the web looks like. And if we get a chance we love to help shape it ourselves. Next to a blog (and a conference!) we also have an active Incubator with shares in several projects and companies.
One of those projects is TwitterCounter. We launched TwitterCounter in June 2008 after we found out that more and more people were ignoring our RSS feed because they were getting our new post notifications via Twitter. If that is happening, we need a Feedburner for Twitter, is what we thought.
And so we built it and launched it, all within 48 hours.
Since then we have grown fast and we are now generating more than 3 million TwitterCounters per day, we generate 30.000 pageviews a day on TwitterCounter.com and sell the Featured spot on the front page for $500 a week.
Yes, five hundred a week and we are sold out until April!
We are constantly working on new features ands improvements for TwitterCounter with the 2.5 developers we have. I’m only half a developer and am lucky to be able to rely on Arjen and Maurits to do most of the heavy work.
The last two weeks we have been working day and night to launch a new and exciting feature which we call TwitterRemote.
TwitterRemote is a small widget you can embed on your site, blog or social profile which displays which Twitter users recently visited your blog. The catch: those Twitter users do have to sign into TwitterRemote first. For now we actually have to ask people for their username + password. As soon as Twitter launched OAuth we will skip that step completely.
After twitter users sign in their profile is displayed on every TwitterRemote enabled website they visit after that. The advantage for site owners is that they see who visits their site and they even have an opportunity to contact these people. Twitter users get a change to improve their visibility for site owners and other visitors. It is kinda like MyBlogLog, or FaceBook connect, but for Twitter!
We tested the service with 200 people for the last 2 days and are now ready to get more testers involved. As always, we highly appreciate any feedback!
Get Your own TwitterRemote:
http://twittercounter.com/pages/remote
Examples
A few examples of TwitterRemote enabled websites (Let me know if when add TwitterRemote to your blog and I will give you a link here too!):
http://thenextweb.com
http://bomega.com
http://fearlessblogger.com/
http://digitalbiographer.com/
http://ekive.blogspot.com/
http://webdeveloper2.com/
http://www.main-vision.com/richard/blog/
http://espreson.com/
http://dirty-martinis.com/
http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/
http://www.arnehulstein.nl/
http://technmarketing.com/
http://saraolive.com/blog/
http://tech0ster.blogspot.com
http://www.acestartups.com
Reviews
Quote from Mashable: “Frankly, this is a fantastic creation.”
http://mashable.com/2009/02/11/twitterremote/
Quote from HughBriss: “If everyone starts using this on their blogs it will be an excellent way for visitors to those sites to get new followers. Very cool.”
http://hughbriss.com/slick-new-twitter-visitor-widget-for-your-website/
Written on 10th February 2009
12 COMMENTS
David Petherick, Contributing Editor, United Kingdom
The popular Twitter Statistics Service TwitterCounter has unveiled a new metric today, where the number of friends a particular Twitter user has can be identified and tracked. The service also provides top lists for different timezones / cities, and can predict how many followers a user might have based on their past rate of growth, and can chart growth in follower numbers over time. Its popular widget to show Twitter followers on a blog , site or social network was tracking over 1,203,721 unique Twitter accounts as at today.
One figure that immediately caught my eye in the new statistics was that, as at today, Barack Obama has exactly the same number of Friends as Mr Tweet!
The Next Web, always one to catch a rising star, first reported on Mr Tweet back in November 2008 – the service from Mr Tweet helps you to find friends on twitter with similar interests with two simple and powerful criteria – either finding influencers beyond your network or showing you which of your followers you should be following back, and now promotes itself with the tagline ‘your personal networking assistant‘.
Written on 5th January 2009
14 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This post is nothing special. Just a quick line to let you know there’s a rather easy way to generate a “Follow me on Twitter“-button. Browse to Twitbuttons, type in your username, hit return, and get ready for some copy/paste action.
Oh and if you’re not afraid of some healthy vanity, you can also give Boris’ Twittercounter show off-badge a shot.
Written on 25th November 2008
1 COMMENT
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
TwitterCounter is one of the projects that got its start in The Next Web Incubator a few months ago. It has been growing madly and we are very proud that is doing so well.
Last week Joost de Valk contacted us with a question: “why doesn’t TwitterCounter offer an API?”
Well, the only reason why we didn’t offer it yet is that we (Arjen mainly) had been completely focused on keeping up with growth and making sure the servers weren’t crashing on us. But a few weeks ago we upgraded our servers and the service was doing fine so I decided to start coding on the API right away.
TwitterCounter in Mint
TwitterCounter in Clicky
Within hours it became clear to me that building a complete API was actually more difficult than my developers skills permitted me to comprehend. I contacted Joost again and asked him what he needed exactly in an API. He responded with a list of features that made me desperate! I could never built all that on short notice! But he ended his note with a sentence that made me smile.
He said “… but if you give me the root password for your service I can just build it for you. :-)”.
I quickly consulted Arjen and we both agreed that it would be an interesting idea to just hand over the keys to the castle! So I emailed Joost our server details and just hoped it would all turn out okay.
It did.
Today we are proudly presenting the TwitterCounter API.
Joost de Valk has built a Pepper for Mint and Sean Hammons has integrated TwitterCounter into Clicky. If you have ideas on how to use TwitterCounter Data for your service don’t hesitate to contact us.
Written on 17th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Wow, there’s a new trend going on in the Next Web office: making Twitter mash-ups. Last week, co-editor Boris launched Twittercounter – Feedburner for Twitter – and a few hours ago, developer Reinier Ladan (@reinier) sent me a line about his mash-up Twannabe.
Reinier thinks that a good way to find new interesting people is checking out who your hero is following. I can see why, as the guys your hero is following might be the crowd you want to be associated with. Though I’m not sure though whether Twitter followers is a good filter. Imagine for example that your web hero is Jason Calacanis. Well, then I have a news flash for you. He has an auto follow script running and currently tracks the tweets of 28,007 people. Although the Twitter API allows Twannabe to work with only 2000 contacts, it’s still a lot of people to follow.
It does work though when you change the definition. Instead of tracking down the friends of an almost unreachable Web 2.0 millionaire, you might want to see who your friends are following. Than, all of a sudden, Twannabe becomes more useful. But to be honest with you, the ‘view all’ option of Twitter does the job as well. Twannabe just creates a fun experience around it.
Written on 12th June 2008
23 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
My co-editor Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten is a serial Internet entrepreneur. You know the type, he constantly comes up with fresh ideas and builds new stuff all the time. His latest project might just become another hit, as it touches an important part of the human being: vanity. The thing is, his new service, called Twittercounter, allows you to show off the number of your Twitter followers. 
It’s just a matter of typing in your Twitter username and copy/ paste the code that shows up.
Apart from the bragging part, Twittercounter is also the new Feedburner. Boris explains why: “At the first Next Web conference, Michael Arrington said he didn’t pay attention to pageviews anymore. For him, it was all about RSS readers. Back then, RSS had just became popular. That was a real eye-opener. From that day on, I have been trying to increase the number of RSS readers on my blogs. But recently, I asked my (editors note: 1449) Twitter followers why some of them hadn’t subscribed to the Next Web Blog RSS feed. I got a lot of replies from people, most of them saying they were happy enough with the blog’s Twitter feed. That was another eye-opener for me”. So with those eye-openers in mind, Boris started working on a Twitter mash-up. The result can be seen here.
Although some people might find it too vain to put the number of Twitter followers on their blog, I expect that a larger number of bloggers can’t resist the nice-looking blue thingy.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
