Neil Patrick Harris, who is ActuallyNPH on Twitter, wanted to give a special prize to his 3 millionth follower. Here’s how used the Twitter API to determine who the lucky winner was:

First, we had to determine if the Twitter API would reliably return a list of NPH’s last 5,000 followers in reverse chronological order. We used three separate twitter accounts to follow @actuallynph at specific times, taking a screen grab of NPH’s follower counts at that time.

We then called the API multiple times over the course of an hour or so, to determine if the follower number remained constant for each test account, and that the distance in followers between the two also remained constant. They did.

This morning, we called the API for NPH’s last 5,000 followers, and counted backwards to the twitter_id of the 3 millionth follower:

id = 19125073
screen_name = sarahbeep
name = Sarah Bates


Congratulations Sarah Bates!

Robert Scoble covered the event for PodTech. His video coverage is here.

Tyrese Gibson at the Twitter Conference – photo credit to Randy Stewart.

Tony Hawk presenting at the Twitter Conference

Shira Lazar has emcee’d numerous Tweet Houses

William Shatner at the Tweet House Comic-Con

Dom Sagolla, co-creator of Twitter, at Tweet House Sundance

Britt Selvitelle, Twitter, at the Tweet House

Robert Scoble at the Tweet House SXSW

Peter Guber at the Tweet House Sundance