Of all the features embedded within, and added to, Twitter over the past several years, the one I get the most mileage out of is the Favorites. For me, favoriting a tweet is the simplest way to hang on to a bit of wisdom or wit in the endless river of information in my timeline. I routinely save tweets throughout the day and review each of them when I have time. These could range from articles to read, music to sample and enjoy, or conversation points I want to preserve for future consideration. Most times, once I’ve reviewed the tweet and completed whatever task I set out for myself, I unfavorite the tweet and move on. Every month or so, I go through my Favorites list and filter out what I want to keep or discard. I’ve unearthed so many gems that I would’ve forgotten otherwise had I not had this short-term memory available. The lack of a similar feature on Facebook is one primary reason why I’m far more likely to follow accounts on Twitter instead.
One rather recent trend I’ve found fascinating is folks using the Favorite feature to indicate approval. There have been automated Twitter bots (often called some variation of “Favstar”) that send you congratulatory messages whenever your tweets get more than a certain number of favorites (25, 50, 100, etc.). This behavior has also led to an uptick of spam accounts favoriting random tweets of yours, for what reasons I’m not entirely sure (other than to simply spam your e-mail account if you signed up for certain Twitter notifications).
What’s really neat about this is how a rather simple microinteraction can be used in radically different ways. It’s another example of how Twitter’s simplicity has led to innovative ways to interact with one another on that network.
How do you use Favorites on Twitter? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
