> Twitter's favourite stream us not bring used because it doesn't add > any extra value to your followers at the moment. They have to go to > the web site and explicitly click favourites to see them. In my > opinion, this is why RT is being used so heavily, it is the only way > for you to tell your followers "Hey' read this".
I wonder though: if Twitter desktop applications provided such a stream, would it be used more? I'm pretty sure that if the replies stream was not shown in any application, users wouldn't go to the site to see them either. identi.ca is making a bit more effort to draw attention to the favorites stream- it has a public "popular notices", and it sends an email notifying you when someone favorited your message. So server-side identi.ca and Twitter are the same regarding favorites, but the UI changes the whole focus. > What I imagine in ESME is a favourite stream which would work like > "Friends' shared items" in Google reader. What is definitely different in Twitter's favorites stream is that you only see *your* favorites, and you already know which they are (you selected them). I think it could really change the game if you could see the favorites of all the people you're following. This would just multiply the usefulness of a social network, where the stream of retweets is filtered through each and every one of your friends. It would also be much easier to remove duplicates, which becomes annoying. > If we had this we could even make a company-wide techmeme like stream, > where we show for instance the 10 most read links at any given moment. Links are easy: we already have an internal url shortening, where we could track which links are actually followed, and since duplicate links are saved under a single internal Url entry, it's much more efficient in consolidating duplicates- one link featured in multiple tweets through different URL shortening services is much more difficult to track. Vassil
