Robert Scoble has been posting a few bits that have gotten me thinking again about Twitter Favorites.  It seems to be that feature that no one REALLY gets.  I mean yes we get that we can favorite tweets that we like, but what’s the point? Few people ever pay attention to them.  Having to go look at each user’s individual favorites makes following someone else’s favorites damn near impossible.

Looking at it, I think Twitter could only have had two purposes for creating the feature in the first place…

  1. To store tweets that you would like to look at later – Due to how they implemented this it seems like this could be likely.  You can favorite them now, look at them later, and then unfavorite them.  I’d say this is the most common use for the feature.  But I don’t think its all that common.
  2. To function similar to the retweet today – Based on the implementation, this doesn’t seem to be true.  If they wanted it to have that functionality, they would have put this in your stream.  When users logged onto the site, they would have seen not only tweets from people the follow, but also the favorites by those people.  Also the API would have been better designed to include favorites in the timeline.

This is what I mean.  The favorite feature doesn’t seem to have a clear purpose.  At least not as it was originally designed.  But I do believe that we can definitely see a purpose for it now.

The retweet, like the public reply, is a concept that was really created by users.  We wanted a way to show our followers the content of a tweet that we received.  It’s a GREAT way to propagate information throughout the network.  Important or interesting things will be retweeted.

Doesn’t this idea seem like what the favorite should be??  Shouldn’t something you favorite be shown to your followers just like something you originate yourself??

To me the favorite allows metrics to be more easily applied to a tweet.  It should be very simple to see who has favorited a specific tweet.  When one of my friends favorites something, I want to see it pushed into my timeline.  And only once.  When my other friends favorite the tweet, I don’t want it to reappear.  But I would like to see what tweets all of my friends are favoriting the most.

Am I the only one that thinks that “Most Favorited Tweets” would be a great page to feature on main Twitter website (Note: I’m HATING using favorite as a verb).  On my personal page there should be a link that shows not only my friends most favorited tweets, but the tweets that my friends have favorited the most.  Both are valuable to me, but in very different ways.

Having this kind of metric (and altering the API appropriately) would give app developers more great stuff to work with.

Twitter has done a lot of molding for their users.  This is a situation where they should push their users to utilize Twitter differently.  Make favorites what they should be, and the change will benefit both Twitter and us tweeters.