Who needs Twitter follower notifications clogging up their inbox? Why doesn't Twitter provide an RSS feed? And why isn't it easier to identify spam-followers?

Turn off those pesky emails and get your updates in RSS with Twitter Follower Notifications.

This tool uses Yahoo! Pipes to create an RSS feed that gives a ton more info about your new followers, like:  

-Their bio and location
-Their last five tweets
-Whether or not they follow you, too
-Whether their updates are private or public

Bonus: you could use this tool for any Twitter user, which could be useful for seeing whos following friends or other 'persons of interest'.

Walk through the code and see how amazing Yahoo Pipes is - instant mashups without the need for tools or a server, all in a beautiful UI that makes it easy to share, clone and build on other ideas.   And YQL makes the web a huge database for your app. 

Twitter Follower Notifications was built by Marsh Gardiner (@earth2marsh), who uses Apigee to give him traffic stats and alerts to help him better understand how people use this tool. He's also been very active in the Apigee feedback forum, pushing us to make Apigee even better. Thanks Marsh, we're listening!

Last time we showed how Apigee calculates API response time. This time we want to discuss how Apigee calculates API error rates.

Apigee provides charts and tables with API error rates by day, hour or minute with drill downs by API URL. 

The 'error rate' calculation itself is simply # of errors divided by # of requests. Errors include both any Apigee error (including those that you might configure) or any target error (such as a rate limit error from the Twitter API).

Let's show this with Brian's Twitter Growl mashup.  Twitter Growl provides alerts on topics using Mac's Growl alerts.   For example, Brian gets alerts for Tweets on Detroit and Michigan news.

Brian monitors Twitter Growl API activity using Apigee.  You can see he had some stretches in mid August and early September with high error rates.  

You can also drill into the days or hours where these spikes in errors occurred, such as this 3 day period in September - high error rates on a single IP that was being rate limited by the Twitter API.

What was happening over this time?   The Detroit Tigers - in a pennant race for the AL Central -  were swept in a 3 game series with the Royals, resulting in rate-limit busting volumes of angst-ridden tweets from the Detroit Twitterati.

So there you have it.  The Tigers are behind all the errors.   (not sure we needed Apigee to tell us that.) And they still have a 4 and 1/2 game lead, FWIW.

If you'd like Twitter Growl to keep you up to date about the Tigers or any other topics on Twitter, thanks to Brian - his version is a fork of a project by visnup on github