Favit delivers hilarious tweets to iPhone

Ronny Kerr · December 4, 2009 · Short URL: https://vator.tv/n/c32

Favstar launches app which presents users with a steady stream of entertaining, oft favorited tweets

Favstar"Sometimes I 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.

Favit1 Favit2

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.)

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What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests. 

Where did the idea for Twitter come from?

Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.

How is Twitter built?

Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes. 

We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.

How do you make money from Twitter?

There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.

In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet. 

At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.

Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.

 

What's next for Twitter?

We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users. 

We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.

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