Hack: Insights from Twitter Favorites

I love any sort of hack or opportunity allowing me a ’sneak peak’ inside the minds of persons’ whose intellect or innovative thinking I admire. One of my favorite things to do is to peruse someone’s personal library, either in their home or office, to gain a better understanding of what they value and/or think of as important reference points. This same logic is also behind my infatuation with Del.icio.us — it’s an opportunity to passively follow what others deem as worthy of attention and future thought. Social bookmarking sites are the modern bookshelves of our times.

So it turns out that Twitter also has a feature allowing me the same type of insights: “favourites.” It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Twitter actually makes publicly available those Tweets that any Twitter user has marked as a favorite (to mark a tweet as a favorite simply scroll over the tweet and click the star).  So here is the hack — in order to see what any Twitter User has been marking as favourites, simply use this logic: http://twitter.com/username/favourites. As an example, here are my recent favorites. Also by simply clicking on “Favvorites” when viewing your “all your friends feed” you can quickly see what Tweets your network has recently deemed important.  Not only is this a great discovery mechanism for content and ideas but it’s also a great way to find new people to follow.

For some this concept of public favorites on Twitter may be obvious, but since it just came across my radar screen I figured I’d share

Update: I may be wrong, but I believe that Favrd is a site that creates a daily leader board of most favorite-ed Tweets

Tagged as: del.icio.us, hacks, new york times, nytimes, social-bookmarks, twitter, twitter favorites, twitter favourites