But from the start, third-party developers sought to make the feature more useful. A service called Favrd sprung up to highlight popular tweets in real time based on the number of favorites, and it quickly became popular among the newly minted profession of Twitter humorists. Favrd closed in after the emergence of Favstar , a more robust competitor that endures to this day. In other words, favs, as they came to be abbreviated, were one more instance of Twitter's community understanding the power of the service more completely than the people who were building it.
They added hashtags to organize content around keywords; retweets to spread content virally; and through brute force converted a near-useless bookmarking feature into a powerful multi-purpose tool. I've favorited more than 60, tweets over the years, and in that time I've come to appreciate how versatile that little button is. I use it as a kind of read receipt to acknowledge replies; I use it whenever a tweet makes me laugh out loud; I use it when someone criticizes me by name in the hopes that seeing it's one of my "favorite" tweets will confuse and upset them.
It often works! Today, a star is unborn. After testing hearts this summer , Twitter is now rolling them out across the user base.
I'm told tests showed that people who had hearts enabled on their accounts used them more often, and I believe it: likes and hearts have become a kind of universal currency of the social web, from Facebook to Tumblr to Instagram.
And there's probably some benefit to Twitter in having a standard icon of approval across its suite of apps — Vine previously used a smiley face, and Periscope debuted with hearts. Now they'll all be the same, and perhaps a bit more comprehensible to all the new people Twitter hopes to lure in with Moments and other products.
All that said, it's hard not to feel defeated by the sudden death of Twitter's star. For all its faults, the favorite was unique to Twitter, and part of what makes the service distinctive.
People want to win free stuff. Retweet or favorite to win your own tote! Essentially, for some respondents, the fav appears to be a second-class mode of engagement. Some participants in the study said it was a way to express approval or agreement without sharing, while others said that "motive for favoriting was often that it was not worth a retweet. While a minority of respondents felt the other way about this, valuing favs over retweets, the respondent data seems to reveal that retweeting may be less about amplifying another user's message and more about the quality and relevancy of that person's feed.
People care about the integrity of their feeds! According to the study, " this response was not uncommon, and often from respondents who otherwise provided good answers Some people seem to have the habit to favorite almost everything in their stream, rather than using the function for a reason.
Then, of course, there is the 'faving to fill the void. What did we learn? According to the study, the "findings highlight that the favoriting feature is currently being over-utilized for a range of motivations, whilst under-supporting many of them.
Indeed, the study finds that user favoriting needs, like bookmarking a tweet for a link, are often unsupported by Twitter's platform. Ultimately, what the diverse range of motivations behind favoriting may show is that despite Twitter's recent attempts to create an increasingly standardized and top-down user experience, it's still a platform with a massively diverse user base that uses Twitter for many different reasons. I'm sorry twitter I don't want to see what people favorite in my timeline.
Some also expressed concern over what they perceive as Twitter turning further into Facebook. Holy shit it shows up in the timeline when u favorite something now! Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Good Subscriber Account active since Shortcuts.
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