We reconfigured things on the web server a while back, and yes, we admit, we didn’t get everything set up the way we should have. But we’ve finally gotten around to taking a peek under the hood, and we think we’ve twiddled the right knobs to get things running more smoothly. In fact, we’re so sure that we’ve made things better, that we’ve raised the combined friends/followers limit from 3000 up to 8000.

If we can just get Geordi to quit hooking Data’s positronic brain into the ship’s computer, maybe we can keep this bucket of bolts flying right!

Update: We also changed the sorting of the lists so that users are listed in a more natural order. If you are looking for a particular friend or follower, it should be easier to find them, now.

If you haven’t heard already, there’s a new prototype in the works (no, really — you can check out the Twitual prototype). It is very bare-bones at the moment (duh, it’s a prototype), but you should get the general idea of where things are going. My next steps are to add in functionality to let you drill into people’s details, add some real UI/design, improve handling of errors, and restructure the underlying code a bit.

Things might have been further along before now, except that I had been running into some technical problems. I won’t bore you with the details here, but I posted about it on my personal blog: Dealing with UTF in node.js

A new version of Twitual is in the works. And when I say new, I mean new. Twitual 2.0 is being built completely from scratch, using the very latest cool web toys tools. It will be completely dynamic — no more waiting and waiting and waiting for results to come back to your browser!

The display will also be less cluttered. Rather than displaying all of the permutations and combinations of your friends and followers on the same screen, we will focus on one at a time. But we will still make it clear which tweeps fall into the various categories. Also, you will be able to get more details on friends, refocus to a new user, see recent tweets, etc.

Most likely, these features will be rolled out in stages (because you’d rather be able to do some of this than none of it, right?), and the timeline is still sketchy. I hope to have the first iteration up early next week (fingers crossed).

The reason it takes so long is that the Twitter API only allows us to fetch 100 entries at a time. There are API calls to return all of the friend/follower IDs for a user at once, but they only return numeric IDs, not the screen name, which is far more useful for display. So we either need to find a way to fetch multiple batches of information in parallel, or we need to mirror the entire database of Twitter IDs and screen_names on our own server. Or maybe both. Even better would be a new API call to fetch all the screen names, but that’s not our call.

And, we realize that there is currently no feedback in the browser while Twitual is doing its thing. We’re going to be working on that, and hopefully when we’re done, we’ll have some spiffy whiz-bang progress bars to let you know what’s going on, and how close we are to being done with your request. Just don’t expect it to happen overnight — we’ll have to take our current, simple, no-nonsense code and transmogrify it into a bunch of complex, full-of-nonsense code. Those kinds of things take time!

In the meantime, we still think Twitual is a pretty nifty tool, and we hope you do, too. If you agree, keep spreading the word about us. Let us feel the love, we’re needy that way!

• The Musem of Modern Betas
• KillerStartups

Have you seen us mentioned anywhere else? Let us know!

We know that some of you were frustrated by the 5,000 combined followers/friends cap that was in place. We are raising the limit to 10,000 now. After we give some more time for the service to shake down, we’ll try raising that up some more, and hopefully one day we can eliminate it completely.

And yes, it’s obvious that we need some slick-looking, AJAX progress bars to display while Twitual is fetching and processing all the follower/friend information. That will come in time, as will some other niceties. 

Thanks to everybody who has tried Twitual so far. Make sure you follow @twitual on Twitter to keep up with the latest news. Keep spreading the word!

The service is currently in ‘alpha’ status, which means that it is still in an active state of development, and things might change pretty frequently. We already have several ideas for new features, and for improvements to the current site. For example, we’re already aware of a javascript performance problem with the dynamic highlighting when the user lists get long, and we’re working on a fix for that.

That said, we’re open to any ideas, bug reports, complaints, or kudos that you might want to send our way. We also wouldn’t mind a ruben sandwich, some onion rings,  and a bottle of Guinness, should you care to send those. We’re also open to offers of advertising or sponsorships. Whatever it is you’d like to talk to us about, feel free to email us at info@twitual.com.