One of my favorite — pun intended — services on the web, Favstar, just got a massive redesign in advance of Apple’s event tomorrow. Does that have anything to do with it? Probably not, but I really like it.
I’ve had the chance to explore the beta for a while now and there are many fantastic improvements.
If you’re unfamiliar with Favstar, it tracks your Favs and Retweets on Twitter and presents them nicely so that you can gloat and fawn over your greatest hits. It’s also a nice companion app that can help you to explore and find new people to follow.
The redesign presents a mich cleaner face for your profiles, trimming away the bold colors of the original for a muted pallete with only the important bits of information pushing forward. You can sort by Favs and Retweets together or just most favorited and most retweeted, which is great.
The tweet view now lets you see the profile pics of those who have retweeted/fav’d you, which is standard, or provides you with a detailed analysis of the first 1k retweets of a tweet, with the account, its followers, a profile pic and text profile for reference. This can be cool as it shows which accounts are ‘first responders’ in retweeting you, allowing you to perhaps reciprocate with a follow of your own.
There’s also a nice new ‘go to user’ function similar to the one found in many third-party clients. You can use this to jump right to another user to check out their tweets and perform actions like fav, RT or issue Favstar Awards like the Tweet of the Day cup.
The mobile website has also gotten a super spiffy update, with a beyond usable column-based interface that is a pleasure to use. The previous site was always iffy on mobile, but the new one makes you want to jump on when you’re using an app like Tweetbot, which provides direct access, and you want to check your fav counts quickly.
Note that the site is slammed at the moment, so if you’re looking to get in to check it out have a bit of patience. Overall its a fantastic improvement to an already great service. If this isn’t a reason to buy the Pro features, I don’t know what is.
Image Credit: Boris Lechaftois
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