Sunday, March 11, 2007

Why I like Stars in Twitter

There's been some talk recently about how to improve your Twitter experience by adopting certain habits.

One particular habit that I've acquired, which I have yet to see mentioned or suggested elsewhere, is to sift through people's favorites, especially people who happen to have a LOT of favorites.

I find this starry habit especially useful because:

  • It's interesting to see what 'tweets' people liked so much, that they took the trouble to 'star' it. You get additional insights into the person's sense of humor, what milestones they want to remember, or what stuff they consider important.
  • Favorites generally have a fantastic wheat-to-chaff ratio when you want to look for new people to follow, as opposed to individually visiting your friend's friends, or worse, surfing the public timeline. Think of it this way: people have already gone through the arduous task of filtering / sorting / tagging the tweets they've received, and all you have to do is skim through the cream of the crop to find interesting new people.
Unfortunately, we only get to see the Top 10 Twitter favorites system-wide right now, even though 14,947 distinct tweets have been starred so far. So IMHO, the best way to get started is to begin with the people listed in the Top 10 favorites, then go through their respective favorites and work your way down from there.

It works for me, and may work for you too.

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