

Show HN: Verified Twitter Followers - mittermayr
http://verified.fruji.com

======
mittermayr
I run fruji.com, which has become somewhat of an unexpected monster and
received more interest than I ever thought it would. Too much actually, so
that most of the bottle necks with regards to communicating through Twitter's
API have become massive issues. I've had lots of celebrity and super large
brands/companies sign up with onboarding periods of weeks (imagine, you sign
up, your first report shows up 3 weeks later, uggh). So, after some customer
feedback rounds, I've realized that most of the big accounts care about their
verified Twitter followers a lot (they are often big relays/multipliers). That
data is much quicker to produce, so I've created a MVP that does just that. It
seems to work fine after a few first tests with around 50 users, but I haven't
announced it yet to my existing users as well as the general public broadly.
Would love to get some technical feedback first from you guys (you've guided
me so well through creating so many other things in the first place and
avoiding mistakes).

EDIT: No need to sign up, this is basically what you'll get after signing up
(this is a shared page, if you look at it from your own account, you're asked
to upgrade through tweeting or paying $2 if you have more than 5 verified
followers):
[http://verified.fruji.com/results/3f4cdab2fa81ac30fd57ef5abd...](http://verified.fruji.com/results/3f4cdab2fa81ac30fd57ef5abdd82229)

EDIT 2: The tech behind: It's a Sinatra/Puma setup, jobs are being queued up
through Sidekiq, data is being stored in Redis (just lots of ids and id
lists), payments are being run through Stripe and front-end is basic JS with
super simple custom HTML templating. It runs pretty slim.

EDIT 3: In case you do sign up, please use 'freefruji' to get the full report
for free. No reason to pay now.

~~~
skyjacker
Last time I ate at Taco Bell was over six years ago, and yet they are
following me!

 _How do they know?_

~~~
MichaelApproved
Taco Bell's Twitter account is only following 14 people. Are you Andrew W.K.?

[https://twitter.com/TacoBell/following](https://twitter.com/TacoBell/following)

~~~
skyjacker
Taco Bell Canada:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/TacoBellCanada](https://mobile.twitter.com/TacoBellCanada)

I'm almost vegan now, so I'm not their target market.

------
jkubicek
This is interesting, but the algorithm needs to be tweaked. It's cool that
@barakobama follows me, but he also follows 200k other people, so it's not
like I'm a special snowflake. I have other followers that are, imo, much more
impressive. Some followers have 100k+ followers and only follow a few hundred
accounts. Those are the people that are more exciting to find out about.

edit: Well, it's not so much that the algorithm needs to be tweaked, it's
advertised as showing VIT followers and that's what it shows. Maybe sort your
VIT followers by the ratio of followers/followees?

~~~
mittermayr
great, great response! my original service (fruji.com) did much deeper
analysis (figuring out when someone is important, vs. just running a large
marketing account, likeliness of large account holders actually reading your
tweets based on the noise on their timeline, stuff like that) - but this took
so much data-fetching from Twitter that I ended up with a 3-week onboarding
process for the large users.

but what would totally make sense, based on your thinking here, is to apply
some of the stats/filtering (a few buttons or sliders maybe) to help sorting
those selected few verified accounts based on a few heuristics.

I'll keep thinking about that and see what I can come up with.

------
kamphey
This is like the opposite of what "startups" do. They put out an MVP and scale
from there. but in fact you found that Fruji did too much and scaled it back
and came out with an Even More Minimally Viable Product. so cool. EMMVP!

I wonder what else you feel you could do singularly that would help
twitterers. Or at least like to see in such a plain awesome usable way!

~~~
mittermayr
thanks for the kind words! yeah, well, you wouldn't believe how many startups
go from a perfectly fine MVP to scaling like crazy in one direction thinking
it's all good from here onwards only to realize the MVP was adressing a very
different aspect/nuance of the market than the built-out product does. I think
klout started with the right MVP, but ended up being a terrible built-out
product in the end.

------
mittermayr
In case anyone is interested in the architecture behind this, job-scheduling,
etc., I'd happily write it up in a blog post or something. It took a few
releases/products to put together a nice, reliable and slim model that
withstands HN mayhem easily (I run this on a $15-20/month server without that
machine even showing a hint of sweat). I use this model/architecture for all
prototypes I build and it allows to release/modify/adapt quickly once it goes
live.

EDIT: Also, Stripe is just awesome. It just works, so, well. I even made $20
today, so cool, I'll make sure to re-invest this in one of the next Show HNs!
Thanks guys!

~~~
sdernley
I'd definitely be interested in reading a blog post on that. Good work with
the release!

~~~
mittermayr
thanks for the kind words, Scott – i'll see what I can get done in the next
few days to put together a write-up maybe.

------
daigoba66
So... what's the value in knowing this? For a lot people, most if not all of
their "verified twitter followers" also follow 10s of 1000s of others. I am
not special.

What's the value of being followed by a "verified" user anyway? I know I'm
pretty naive and uneducated about the whole "social networking"
marketing/advertising industry.

P.S. On this page, the CSS attribute "user-select: none;" is really annoying.

~~~
petercooper
It's not perfect, but looking at only 'verified' users cuts through about 95%
of the chaff (although you do lose many excellent non-verified people,
naturally).

But if you discover you're followed by a handful of your favorite famous
programmers, maybe a VC or two, things like that.. it could be useful to know
you might be able to take advantage (in a nice way) of those connections some
day.

~~~
mittermayr
and, what peter said, exactly. and especially keep in mind: I didn't mean to
push this out to you guys as users necessarly, initially was thinking of
getting some tech/implementation feedback rather than market testing this. the
incentive for creating this little product was mostly kindled by many larger
accounts I host at fruji.com who asked me to get them the data faster and
that's all they'd need for now, just a list of their verified accounts (as a
means of pre-selecting).

i personally also fully agree that there are many, many folks out there
without a verified account who provide tremendous value. this really is just
one niche approach. one page in a large report basically.

------
basicallydan
Seems to work! In fact, it showed me 6 people, but I didn't sign up fully.

Sadly, my verified followers mostly are made up of companies I've worked for
or companies I've complained about/used Twitter as customer service with.

~~~
mittermayr
same here. it's usually (sadly) also often companies trying to build their
initial user base.

------
petercooper
I found something about this very interesting.. that is, Stripe + low dollar
amount + something potentially useful == me copying and pasting in my credit
card details from 1Password very quickly.

I've not come across anyone else doing anything like this, yet there are
probably thousands of such small services I'd be happy to pay a few bucks for
here and there, especially if it's through a payment system I trust like
Stripe or PayPal.

That aside, I wish it'd let me export the list of verified followers in a nice
way after I've paid my $2 :-)

~~~
mittermayr
yes, absolutely agree. this is the power of Stripe combined with (finally!)
super affordable v-host providers I was partly adressing earlier in a comment.
my cost is actually next to nil. They make it possible for me to just push
this out with minimal implementation work (this took about 3-4 days to write)
and really sane fees all around. It's so simple, the refunding is so straight
forward, it actually makes sense to keep costs low, simply because I can, at
this point.

and of course, I could slap a $20 price on that and see if it still validates.
and the implication of a higher price > higher quality etc. would possibly
play into that as well.

but I am a very reluctant 'paying user' myself. it takes ages for me to
convince me until I finally pull that credit card out. I feel many people just
charge what everybody else charges, or try to get the most out of it (which
all makes sense). but this is just a small tool, I want to stick to coffee-
pricing if at all possible.

and you guys paid my server bills for the next 3 months now, so this is nice
enough for me today.

~~~
petercooper
_I_ wouldn't have paid $20 for it as it is, BTW.

I spend hundreds of dollars a month on data streams related to my business,
but this falls into the personal expense bracket. $5 would be my "just go for
it" limit on this, but I'd definitely pay more if the offer was stronger (for
example: $20 to do 10 accounts, have a CSV export, get a report emailed to me
once per month for a year - value adds like that).

~~~
mittermayr
check out fruji.com then ;) but let me know once you've done (help@fruji.com)
and I'll get you that pro account for free.

~~~
petercooper
Haha, I had no idea you had a main product at the main domain - I'll check it
out later :)

------
apike
Interesting. I paid the $2, or at least tried to. The Stripe form processed
and gave a "paid" checkmark, but then redirected me to a plain HTML page that
simply said "Oh, too bad." When I reloaded it prompted me to pay again,
although I believe it went through.

So, interesting app but needs some payment debugging.

~~~
mittermayr
oh wow, that's not good. I've fixed it now, you should be good to go (account
is upgraded). sorry about the troubles there!

~~~
apike
Works now, thanks!

------
richev
Nicely presented and implemented...although the "upgrade" link on the box that
appears when you mouseover the icon to the right side of the first 5 results
does not seem to work. When I click it nothing happens.

Tested in IE11 and FireFox.

~~~
mittermayr
fixed (I think). thanks man!

------
bkil
What's the difference between you guys and
SocialRank.com/Verifiedfollowers.co?

~~~
mittermayr
I don't try to be different, I don't even try to compare to others at this
point. When I made fruji.com, everybody said: Dude, there's Klout, you are
nuts, it doesn't make sense. People often forget how big the pond actually is,
there's so many fish in the sea here, there's enough room for all kinds of
niche ideas. A lot of my paying users on fruji.com are also paying users for
thousand-dollar enterprise social monitoring tools. I usually only get curious
about competitors once people start asking for certain features that keep them
from sticking with my product and forces them to go back all the time.

EDIT: Just one thing that differentiates this little thing from the ones you
mentioned: I don't require your e-mail address to proceed. Couldn't test the
sites you mentioned for that reason, wouldn't let me go past that.

~~~
AznHisoka
a small differentiator to people who are serious about paying, imo.

~~~
mittermayr
definitely. but most people find out they're willing to pay after trying out a
bunch of services. and it's always tough to unlist yourself from all the
e-mail spam that follows once you've found the service you want to stay with.
but I get the argumentation, requiring e-mail on fruji.com for the same
reasons.

------
ig1
I actually built something similar at a hackday a few weekends ago
specifically for startup people (i.e it showed you investors, journalists,
etc. who followed you):

[http://startupfollowers.com](http://startupfollowers.com)

(although far more crude/hacked together than fruji)

~~~
mittermayr
i like it!

------
bishnu
Boy, I sure will "be proud" that the Seamless and Roku corporate accounts
follow me. I'm sure that's because of my high quality content and not a craven
attempt at brand/customer building ;)

------
1337biz
Thanks for that tool! Really great way to find the "hidden" gems among the
followers and keep a closer eye on engaging with them.

/edited my spelling. Thanks tgcordell!

~~~
mittermayr
thanks for taking the time to try this out, really appreciate the kind words.

------
egypturnash
Cool, now I get to decide if @gocomics following me actually means anything!

(I'm a cartoonist, and have a friend who is syndicated there.)

~~~
mittermayr
I just checked them out, they at least have a lot more followers than they
follow, so this usually is a good sign. although, unfortunately, they have
tweets from about 8k people on their timeline, so it's gonna be tricky to get
their attention in all that noise.

~~~
egypturnash
Yeah, if I actually want their attention it is probably better to go schmooze
them in person at a comic con or something!

