Hey, A friend and I recently launched TwitStat.us (http://twitstat.us), a site where you can basically create a badge that display results about any given search terms from Twitter's Search API. The badge that we give to users is pure javascript that just queries Twitter's API.
That said, I'm not too sure as to whether there's any issue with consistently hitting Twitter's API with Javascript - I mean, it'd be pretty difficult to rate limit that, no? Anybody got experience with this and care to share? If you have any critiques about TwitStat.us, feel free to toss those out too. Always open to suggestions! - Ryan McGrath
