Do we really need Favoriting AND Retweeting on Twitter? Combine the two like this:

Over the last two or three days, internet evangelist Robert Scoble has begun using Twitter favorites to highlight his favorite tweets. The problem with that of course, is that it means people either have to visit his favorites page or alternatively, subscribe to his Twitter favorites RSS feed, both of which seem too much effort.

I also started considering the difference between Retweeting and favoriting Tweets, aren’t they – in most cases – the same thing? Anyhow, next thing I see is Scoble feeding his RSS Twitter favorites RSS feed through Friendfeed. Definitely a step in the right direction because it would technically mean he could feed that through to Twitter (thanks to Friendfeeds Twitter autopositing functionality). Still, I thought, not good enough, because although it included the name of the original Tweeter (see here for an example), it didn’t include a “RT @” before hand which would, more often than not, leave the original tweeter with no idea he was being recognised.

Moving on, I decided the best thing to do was to create a Yahoo Pipe that would take the Twitter Favorites feed, add a RT @ before the tweet (which already includes the original tweeters name), and then feed that through Twitter Feed.

The result? Every time you favorite a tweet, a few minutes later (or at least within 30 minutes), you’ll be retweeting the tweet you just favorited.

So in short, let me explain the steps, very easy in fact:

1. Grab your twitter favorites RSS feed, will look something like this: http://twitter.com/favorites/13348.rss .
2. Insert that feed into here along with whatever you want to prefix your tweets with…the standards are “RT @” or “Via @”
3. Next up, grab the RSS feed, by right clicking “Get as RSS” and copy the link location.
4. Finally, create a Twitter Feed with that RSS feed and you’re done!