At the moment, I don’t really use Twitter’s “favourite” feature, because a long list of favourites with no filtering is not much help really.
When I bookmark sites in my browser, I put them into folders. Email gets organised with labels. And blog posts have categories to aid navigation. It makes a lot of sense for anyone with more than a handful of things to organise.
If I could “fave” a tweet but also add it to some kind of group, label or category – such as “unpublished blog tips” – this would be a huge help for using my tweets in future blog posts. I often post tips on Twitter that I forget to publish on my blog.
It might help to be able to make a private “fave group”, similar to the way a private Twitter list works. That way, I can work with this stuff without revealing the details until I’m ready. Equally, a public “fave group” would be a really nice way to group certain tweets together, but without using something as fluid and open as a hashtag. Yes, hashtags work well but sometimes you want to limit the information – especially as a lot of comments get retweeted, some may be inaccurate, or not that useful.
I do wonder if this kind of functionality may be better as a third-party app though, if one doesn’t already exist.
What do you think?
About Ben
Spooky coincidence – I wrote something similar just a couple of weeks ago! http://www.140char.com/2010/07/twitter-should-rename-favourites-to-saves/
I use the favorites feature to mark things as “to read” – usually if there’s a link in a post and I’m reading Twitter on my phone, I’ll favorite it as a way to remember to go back and check it out in depth when I’m on my home computer.
What I would like to see on Twitter is a way to block out all tweets from Foursquare and other location apps, the same way I can block apps from my Facebook feed. I don’t really care where anyone is at any given moment, and when someone is out, say, running errands in rapid succession, it fills up my twitter stream really fast.
Hi Dan – spooky indeed! I’m not really using favourites that much, but I might use them more if some changes were made.
Hi Kirsten – I unfollow people who post little other than foursquare notifications. Your idea might be a better way.