The most likely reason is that the system hasn't received your information from Twitter yet. If you see a message that the user has not been imported, then you may have to wait up to a day depending on how many other people are in the queue. For more information on the process, see the next question

If your profile page does appear, but there's nobody listed, then either the system has hit a bug or you haven't been active enough on Twitter to build a network from your conversations. See What is the BFF list based on? for more about how the graph and list are built.

If you are active and imported but it's still not showing up correctly, the system must have a bug. Let me know about it, with as much information as you can give me, and I'll try to fix it.

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To build your graph and list, the system first imports all your messages, and then imports the messages of everyone you've talked to on Twitter. For an average user with 40 or 50 friends and a 1000 messages, this will take 10 minutes. There may be other people in the queue to be processed though, so it may be several hours in total.

If you follow me on Twitter, I'll send you a DM when your profile is ready. If it's been more than a day and you still don't see your page there may be a bug so please contact me so I can try to fix the problem.

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The system tries to measure your closest friends (Best-Friends-Forever) based on how many conversations you've had with them.

So, if you have a friend Alice and you've sent 3 @ messages to her, and she's sent 4 @ messages to you, you're closer to her than Bob who you've only sent 1 message to, and got 2 back.

It doesn't count direct messages, since they're private and password protected. It also ignores anybody who's sent messages to you but you've never replied, since it assumes you don't actually know them.

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If you're looking at your BFF list and graph but they don't match who you actually talk to on Twitter, let me know. You may have run into a bug I don't know about and that will help me fix it.

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I'm only able to send direct messages to people who are following me on Twitter, so I have a Follow button on the import page. If you click that, the Twitter API will bring up a dialog box for you to enter your username and password to confirm you actually are the right person.

This information is only sent to Twitter, my site never sees your username or password. I totally understand why people might be reluctant to enter this information so the button is only there as a convenience. You can also manually follow me from my Twitter page or forget about getting a DM and just check back in a couple of hours to see if it's done.

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Whenever a Twitter user changes their portrait, the location of their picture changes. Since Mailana doesn't check the account information for every user frequently, sometimes it will have an out-of-date URL for the image, and it will show up as missing. I'm trying to work out a way of fixing this that doesn't put too much strain on my and Twitter's servers by checking too often.

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I'm glad you asked! There are a few options I don't make obvious. If you add &duration=30 to the end of your profile URL you can see a profile based just on the last month, eg
http://twitter.mailana.com/profile.php?person=andraz&duration=30
The duration number is in days, so to look at the last week you can change it to 7, for the last year 365, and so on.

If you want to embed the graph on your own site, you can download the XML input that represents your network by clicking on the disk icon. Then download the flashgraph.swf file and include it in your own page with ?xml_file_name=your xml file name. There's no documentation on this, but view the source of your profile page for an example.

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