So… just an idea for an “app”. As I understand it, Instagram now blocks anonymous Follower “scraping”. You used to be able to just grab a public profile and see counts. Now it’s much more involved (including Facebook graph APIs / Instagram for business etc).
If you had an “App” where someone could put in an Instagram username and have it display (current / live) user count … I would be interested. Ps. This would obviously be something that would / should apply across all social media platforms…
Agreed. Would really like to see this feature for Instagram. Specifically follower count.
Agreed. Would love Twitter follower account as well. Even better if you could display follower count on multiple platforms at the same time.
Our policy for official apps has been to play by the rules and not use “scraping” to try to get at stuff that there’s no official channel for. Reason is it could burn bridges in a pretty catastrophic way — for example, getting Tidbyt blocked from accessing official API’s, or even land us in legal trouble.
So basically, for Instagram, that means we can’t just access the follower count of any random profile since they are now blocking that for privacy reasons.
I’m still planning on doing Instagram follower count, but the official way to do it is that you connect to your Instagram account, and we show your follower count. We don’t have a way to get at the follower count for other people’s profiles, sorry 
For Twitter, it’s a lot simpler. They make follower counts publicly available with their API so we can do that easily. Actually we already have a Twitter app in beta, could possibly add it to that (@matslina, what do you think?).
I really like the idea of having a multi-platform thing too, that would be pretty neat!
Yeah I think we can have an option in the Twitter app to show follower count. Shouldn’t be too hard to build if there’s interest.
I’d have no problem authenticating my accounts if it meant real-time updates. I’ve been surprised how few services out there offer it.
Can’t wait to receive my Tidbyt!
Awesome. Yeah, I don’t much follow other Instagram accounts to know their amount of followers 
This request is specific to my Instagram Business Account and knowing how many followers I currently have.
Are you still planning on adding an Instagram followers app? Thanks!