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:
- Grab your twitter favorites RSS feed, will look something like this: http://twitter.com/favorites/13348.rss .
- Insert that feed into here along with whatever you want to prefix your tweets with…the standards are “RT @” or “Via @”
- Next up, grab the RSS feed, by right clicking “Get as RSS” and copy the link location.
- Finally, create a Twitter Feed with that RSS feed and you’re done!
I think this would be a bad idea. People use the favorite function for different purposes. I for instance use it as a bookmark function to save tweets in the twitter stream I would like to read later when I have the time. That wouldn’t comply very well with your idea of RT’ing every saved favorite tweet within every half hour.
If you are using it for something else then of course this isn’t a good idea. But 99,9% of the Twitter population doesn’t use the Favorite function at all. For them, this could work. Now all we need to do is automate the script explained here…
I agree with Bo Damgaard, I also use the favorite function to save something to be able to find it back easily, and most of my favorites I didn’t RT. They’re for personal use, more or less.
I think this is pretty smart. Would be even better if it wouldn’t take 30 minutes though.
Exactly,fFavorites are more of a personal place, for tweets you’re not yet sure of retweeting, or you’re going to check later.
But still, this is a nice way of sharing tweets too, fo people who like it.
thanks!
Halleluja! I tried to build a pipe on this principle, but didnt succeed. This is great!
Good post Zee, I’ve been saying that the Twitter faves were “for the birds” :) due to lack of a feedback cycle since early this year. Oh well, one more thing broken about Twitter, what else is new…
Like your little Pipes/TwitterFeed hack, alternatively, people could use the Greasemonkey script to get an RT button into the Twitter interface, or just use Tweetdeck or Seesmic, etc. All of which of course have various drawbacks of their own.
So you are right to point out that it is an odd state of affairs for Twitter to have a faves/”Like” solution that no one uses, while having the RT convention not even sanctioned/supported by Twitter that everyone uses..go figure..engineering fail in action..