I know it's come up, but mostly in the context of an API call to see if a specific user is following via sms; could we get a dumb statistical API call to give us at least a hint at this information-- perhaps with a minimum number of followers, if the concern is privacy- based?
I'd be pretty happy even if it was severely rate limited. This could be very basic (% of your tweet load over the last 7 days was SMS based) or couched in a slightly more comprehensive report (i.e. in the last 7 days you tweeted this many times and the tweet was actually loaded this X many times by the following: Web - %, sms - %, Applications (All)- %, Retweets (All) - %). An iteration of the breakdown for Retweets would be nice, as well as a breakdown for mobile and desktop applications if you can tell, but beggars can't be choosers. We publish via twitter, but we don't know how we're being read, so we don't know how to tailor the experience we provide. If 20% of the actual loads of our tweets are via SMS, then we shouldn't start running links to flash-based visual poetry, for example. If only 3% of our loads were SMS or even rooted in mobile applications, it might make sense to soup up our content. Trying to satisfy a 97% web-based readership with content that is SMS/browserless-phone-safe might not be the best use of our time, if the reality of our readership is that everyone's already sitting at a computer. I realize broader usage statistics are being guarded fairly closely-- and I think the "the tweet was loaded this many times," while useful on our end, is the most likely to expose information you'd like to hold close for now, and is therefore the most expendable; the percents allow room for tools that encourage users to better gear their content to the realities of their readership--and hopefully improve the ecosystem in the process.
