Twitter needs to implement some statistics on their users.
When I find someone that I may want to follow, I really want to know how often they tend to tweet before I follow them. Ideally, I would like to see the trend of their tweets over the last 7 days, the last month, and then perhaps the lifetime of the account. I tried to find some ways to get this information and stumbled across http://tweetstats.com, which is based on a perl script to generate some cool information but it takes too long and is not exactly what I wanted. At least it wasn’t fast enough. I need it now!
Then I realized that twitter gives you an RSS feed of the person’s updates and Google Reader gives you statistics of RSS feeds. So if I go to Google Reader and add the RSS feed for the Twitter user then I can click on the ‘show details” link and see the number of posts per day that the person averages, but my initial request is still out there.
While researching this, I found some interesting XMLHttpRequests from google in my Google Reader which spurred me to check out this article on Google Reader API which has, yet to come to light.