“SometimesI eat a lot of cheese, and other times I eat a lot of cheese but don’t
tell you because it’s my secret cheese eating time.”
“When I die, I want my body donated to political science. That department won’t know what to do with it. Hilarious.”
“I was escorted out of the funeral before I was done high fiving everyone.”
The silly, the creative, and the slightly offensive.
Those are the kinds of tweets you should expect to read on Favstar, a site one user describes as “highly concentrated Twitter goodness.” The brainchild of Tim Haines, Favstar aggregates the most popular tweets on Twitter by tracking what everyone is favoriting.
The above tweets, for example, have been favorited 128, 178, and 119 times, respectively.
The system for selecting tweets is obviously more intricate than just choosing oft favorited tweets,
but Haines hasn’t revealed much besides the obvious: celebrity and
tech-related tweets get filtered out pretty quickly (no one wants to
read everything your favorite actor has to say).
Thursday evening, Favstar announced the launch of Favit (App Store link), an elegant
iPhone version of Favstar’s online tweet stream, available for $2.99.
The central interface merely displays a tweet and a greyed-out star,
which can be clicked if the user wishes to favorite the tweet. To move
through the stream, the user scrolls right. While the identity of the
tweeter is hidden (Haines believes the humor should arise from the
tweet itself, not just the identity of the user who posted), scrolling
up reveals their user name and avatar. Users can then add or message
the user, or retweet their Favstar-worthy post.
In an interview with The Unofficial Apple Weblog, Tim Haines talks about the inspiration and concept behind Favstar and Favit:
There’s a lot of brilliantly funny tweets on Twitter. But they’re a
silent whisper going mostly unheard in the roaring noise of most
peoples twitter timelines. Favit is designed to remove all the noise
and distraction, and show only the best tweets from Twitter. It shows
only the text of the tweet, and presents one choice — favorite it or
not. You enjoy and judge the tweet on it’s merits — without even
having the distraction of who wrote it exposed to you. After you’ve
read it, you can then choose to reveal the author, and retweet or email
the tweet, or add the author to your favstar.fm list.
Though Haines says that this first version of Favit embodies most of what he would like the app to do, he hints that new features might be implemented
further down the line. For the most part, though, he’s working on
fine-tuning the system’s tweet-selection process. (On a related note:
it seems slightly unfair and inefficient that users who follow Favstar
on Twitter are more likely to be selected by Favstar’s system.)
