15 Jun, 17:34, 26 x viewed

During the Kings of Code event two weeks ago I was talking about Twitter with someone. He mentioned how many followers he had and I mentioned my number of followers. He was impressed with my number of followers and I felt a moment of pride. Then I suggested that this number might become significant one day as it says as much about someone as pageviews or RSS feeds. If I come to a blog and see they have 10.000 rss feed subscribers I take their opinion more serious than if they have 10 feed subscribers.
The same works for Twitter. When I see people on Twitter with more followers than I have than I'm interested to find out why. What do they tweet and who are they? During that same conversation I said that it probably wouldn't be long before a Feedburner for Twitter would arise that would start tracking the follower count for people.
Right after that conversation I opened my laptop and started checking out names for this project. Twitterburner.com was gone and FeedTwitter.com didn't make sense so I came it with TwitterCounter.com. The domain was available and I registered it that same day.
Then I got distracted with other stuff until early last week. The subject came up at the office and I asked around who would have time to develop the idea. Everybody is pretty busy and we decided it wasn't a high priority project and we would postpone it until later.
The next day however the idea was still buzzing in my head and I decided to do some sketches in PHP to see how difficult it would be to built it. Within a few hours I had a basic site and some scripts that sort of worked. I worked until 2am in the morning on Tuesday and then the whole day on Wednesday. On Tuesday I arrived at the office and asked Sander and Arjen to help me with a few details. Sander fixed my database (MySQL) and Arjen spent some time fixing a few algorithms.
during lunch that day Ernst-Jan asked me if I would be ready to launch TwitterCounter.com on Monday. I smiled and said 'Why not just launch now'. So we did.
This is what the site currently says:
TwitterCounter: How popular are you? (open beta)

TwitterCounter is a service for Bloggers, Social networkers and other well connected individuals to communicate and track the number of followers they have on Twitter. Add the TwitterCounter to your blog or profile to attract more followers. Also check out our top 100 and add your own name too!
After we launched Ernst-Jan published a short review on The Next Web Blog and I twittered it. That was enough to start an avalanche of blogposts, tweets and traffic to TwitterCounter.com. The service has been reviewed on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb and made it to the front page of Del.icio.us where it stayed for hours.
The most exciting thing though has been the huge adoption of the TwitterCounter at hundreds of blogs all over the world. Here are some randomscreenshots (+ links) to a few blogs displaying the TwitterCounter: