So you use Twitter because you have a blog and you want to promote your articles. Or, you want to talk with your girlfiend while she’s working. These are only two examples of how people use Twitter, the first ones I can think of now. Pretty much everyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis knows everything about it, from retweets and replies to lists and DMs. But what about Favorites? On Twitter, you can mark a tweet as favorite, like you can do with photos on Flickr or Deviantart. I didn’t use this feature until a few months ago, when I realized I could start faving tweets rather than sending them to Read it Later. And yes, as soon as I started following @Digeratii and @PatrickPatience I had to start using favorites.
Besides the “saving links for later” thing, people use favorites to collect the best, most ironic and, sometimes, sarcastic tweets they find in their timelines. Just take a look at my favorites tweets to get the idea of the stuff I think it’s worth a “fave”. Now,it’s pretty obvious that by using only Twitter itself you don’t have a way of “discovering” favorite tweets around the world, and that’s why websites like Tweeteorites and Favstar came to life.
Today I’ll take a look at Tweeteorites, a web service that allows you to browse and saving tweets into your favorites, and its official iPhone application, which has been sitting in my homescreen for many weeks now.
Tweeteorites for iPhone is a very simple and straighforward app that you can use to view your friends’ favorites (and hence discover new users), how many times your tweets have been favorited and a global leaderboard to view the world’s most favorited tweets. The first tab in the homescreen is Leaderboard, from here you can check which are the most favorited tweets, all over the world. The app supports infinite scrolling, so you don’t have to press buttons or whatever when you reach the bottom of the list. In the list you can see the author of the tweet together with the avatar, how many hours ago the tweet went online and the total number of favorites that tweet has.
If you hold & swipe on the tweet you can see the profile pictures of the people who faved the tweet. I wish it supported a more Tweetie-ish “just swipe”, but still. If you tap on a tweet you’ll be able to open the http links it could possibly contain (in-app browser, like Tweetie), fave it, see another lists of the users that faved it, jump to the author’s profile and even retweet it.
Tweeteorites doesn’t stop here: you can also choose between the old “RT” post, a quote (but they’re not like Tweetie’s /via @ quotes) or an “official” retweet. I personally choose “Quote” and change the text to /via @username every single time. Also, you can consider Twetetorites a mini-Twitter client, as it also lets you send tweets from the home screen. Turns out this app is pretty interesting, huh? Yeah, but there’s more. As I mentioned before you can see a user’s profile: from the profile screen you can either follow or unfollow someone and see other details like total tweets, followers and description.
Back to main page, the Friends’ Favorites tab is very similar to the leaderboard, but it displays only the faves from the people you follow. I’d like to focus on the last section, the Ego Boost. Who doesn’t need a small dose of ego boost everyday? With the Ego Boost you can see how many people favorited your tweets. You can even see who actually faved it. Great when you’re a little bit depressed.
Overall, Tweeteorites is a good application that makes the Twitter favorites experience a lot better. Well, let’s say it made start using favorites, and that’s a terrific good start. The app comes at $0.99 in the App Store. [iTunes Link]
Now go over and favorite the tweet I sent for this review.
