Updating # of followers for a big list of Twitter accounts?

The functionality I'm trying to implement is used in a site called Wefollow ( http://wefollow.com/ ):

On this WeFollow 开发者_如何学Ceach account is checked for

• # of followers

• # of statuses

How can reliably update the information for each account without bumping into the 2000 queries/hour limit imposed by Twitter?

I'm trying to build a directory and update the same details. How can I deal with this?

Help would be very much appreciated.

EDIT: I'm trying to understand how that site works, not promoting it. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear enough.

If there's a hard limit, there's a hard limit. I would do this by putting all accounts in a rotating queue and updating them in that order up to a given maximum. If you can't cover all accounts, that's too bad. You could also calculate activity values based on deltas per user and prioritise the updating of those users. If a user hasn't changed in a month then there's no point checking that user more frequently than every week. Likewise, if a given user is very active, they can be pushed to the front of the queue.

BTW I would say this is verging on not programming related.

You can apply to have your IP address and account whitelisted which will increase your rate limit to 20,000/hour if you are approved. (http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Rate-limiting)

At FanPageList.com, we update information for our accounts every 2-4 hours. If you look closely at wefollow.com, some of their counts are outdated. Even at TwitterCounter.com, they only claim to update their counts daily (unless you pay for their paid service, they will start tracking your account hourly).