I Forgot My Mantra is Scott Jackson's webtumblespacelog.

Twitter Favorites

I don’t use Twitter’s Favorites feature very much because I can’t quite figure out why it exists.

Twitter:

Some twitter updates are just too good to be forgotten.

So it’s for your favourite tweets. But what does that mean? I mean, if you come at it by assuming that Twitter is for telling people What You’re Doing™, the Favorites feature doesn’t make any sense. I’m meant to favour particular things that people did at a certain time?

Man, remember that time Steve went to that web conference? That was one of my favourite things that Steve has done. FAVR’D.

On the other hand, if you assume Twitter’s purpose is to share links with people (one of the things I use it for), it makes a little more sense. You can favour links to things that you like to show that you like them, I guess.

Then there’s this third way of using Twitter — as a medium for creative writing (aka Snarky Little Jokes in 140 Characters or Less™). This is where the Favorites feature makes the most sense, I think. When someone writes some little Twitter joke, I click the little ☆ button to show that I like it. Even then, the idea of Twitter being a stream of information makes me think that tweets like this are almost disposable — no longer relevant or funny after a short period and replaced by something newer.

That’s all from the perspective of someone who reads Twitter. But what about someone who writes for Twitter? Well, as a part-time Snarky Little Jokes person (minus the “my jokes are funny” part, of course), I can use the Favorites feature to see how people respond to what I say. (By the by, I got way WAY too excited when I found out that two of my favourite people on the Internet favr’d one of my stupid little jokes. Like, I was really happy for the rest of the day. Think that’s pathetic of me? I don’t care.)

The way that I use Twitter’s Favorites feature is just as a temporary, arbitrary list of high-priority stuff — things to follow up on, things to come back to. I don’t even use it that often. The weird thing is, this is actually one of my favourite features in other applications — the ability to come up with a short list of things that make up a subset of all of the things in the application, and the only condition that defines whether or not something is in the list is the question “do I want this in the list?”

So, how do people use Favorites on Twitter?