The “Favorite” is kind of like the unwanted step child feature of Twitter. Though it has been around since the early days of the service, they have never really done anything to promote its use.
One would assume you’re supposed to use it to start your favorite tweets, but I don’t use it like that, because what’s the point? Instead, I mostly use it to bookmark tweets that I want to find later. But a new service Favstar.fm hopes to take the Favorite functionality back to its roots, and make it useful.
While the fairly popular Favrd service has revolved around favorites for a while, it is basically only useful to show the most favorited tweets across the whole network on any given day. You can find individual user pages, but it’s not very obvious how to do that, and results only go back for a few weeks. Favstar.fm wants to be the all encompassing Twitter favorites destination.
The main page shows a recent leaderboard that can be set to show tweets of only a certain level (10 favorites, for example). If you sign in via Twitter OAuth, you get a whole range of functionality, including the ability to follow people from Favstar.fm and see what tweets your friends are favoriting.
Also, by signing in it is easy to see who is favoriting your tweets. As we all know, a big part of Twitter is vanity, so many of us likely want to know who is favoriting which tweets of ours. With Favstar.fm, it’s easy to see that.
Because it’s aiming to track favorites across the whole network for all time periods, Favstar works a little slower than Favrd does, developer Tim Haines tells us. But it seems like a fair trade-off to get all this data. And if you want your data quicker, Favstar.fm prioritizes those users who sign in via Twitter OAuth.
This actually makes favourites on Twitter worthwhile. Looks like a great time waster to browse through.
Presumably it’s easy to game and will become a hotbed for spammers.
I’ll be trying to make it hard to game.
If it becomes popular…we’ll all be trying to game it. =)
And that will become the game. =P
gentlemen, please start your favorite tweets.
You may want to check out favebytes.com( generates an opml of all your friend’s favorite tweets, more to come ) and while you’re at it toriseye.quodis.com
Favstar.fm? – sounds more like a teen radio network than a twitter gizmo.
Hot Tim, hot. Well done!
The only use that I have found for twitter favorites is to mark links I see on the iphone for later viewing on my PC. So, in essence, their not really “favorites” but bookmarks I guess?
Looks interesting. thanks!
TIP: Use favorites when people say nice things about you, it becomes your online testimonial list!
I saw a tweet from favstar10 yesterday, but I didn’t go to their site because I thought it looked kind of spammy. It’s actually a pretty useful site.
Favotter has been making Japanese language twitter favourites more useful, people set favourite more. It has also an English version but seems not known.
http://favotter.matope.com/en/
Will that integrate with Flickr?
Sounds intresting