Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [26]
Save it for later.
Acknowledge that it helped you or that you found it amusing.
Mark it so that you can reply to it later.
Remember it so that you can reference it in a blog post or article.
Save it to quote later.
Figure 3-4: Your favorite tweets are stored forever.
Ari Herzog (@ariherzog) pointed out that favorites are an untapped opportunity to collect testimonials and other tweets that might have value for your company. Innovation software company Brightidea (@brightidea) uses it to curate a great collection of Tweets about innovation, drawing upon Twitter search results for keywords related to innovation.
Our point is, don’t limit yourself to using Favorites only as literal favorites. Use Favorites whichever way works best for you!
If you start using the Favorites icon on a regular basis, you’ll soon have a large collection of tweets that you can gather data from for various projects or reference when you need to remember a particular joke or comment. You can also use it for bookmarking links so that you can visit it later — many of your best links and referrals will come from your fellow Twitter users.
One way to find more people on Twitter is to visit the Profile pages of your friends on Twitter and look at their Favorites, to see which tweets they liked the most. If your best friend marked a particular tweet as a favorite, and you’re not yet following the person who posted that tweet, you may want to start following that person.
Searching favorite tweets
At the time we write this book, Twitter doesn’t yet offer a way to search within your list of favorite tweets and hasn’t announced any plans to do so. While your list grows, you may want to find some way to catalog your tweets. Some people use a spreadsheet in a desktop program such as Microsoft Excel or a Web-based one such as Google Docs. Some keep a record of their favorite tweets’ permalinks (permanent link URL) pages and tag them by topic, using bookmarking services such as Delicious (www.delicious.com) or Diigo (www.diigo.com).
Indexing your favorite tweets takes a bit of hacking:
1. To get to a tweet’s permalink, find the tweet in your Twitter stream and click the small link below it that shows the time the tweet was sent.
That link loads the tweet on its very own page, which you can bookmark for later because that page has a standard Web URL that always leads to that specific tweet.
2. Add that URL to your favorite bookmarking service.
Follow the directions that your bookmarking service offers for how to add a URL.
3. If the option is available, tag the link so that you can search by topic later to find it again.
After you have a system in place for keeping track of tweets that you want to save by using the favorite feature, you can then find them whenever you need them. You can also use the third-party application Tweecious (see Chapter 14) by tweeting the permalink to your favorite tweets and including the word favorites in the tweet where you do so.
Becoming a Renaissance Man via the Everyone Tab (RIP)
The Everyone tab used to lead to Twitter’s Public Timeline, which contained all tweets from all twitterers everywhere. It’s no big surprise that the Public Timeline was always pretty crowded and random, and that it became ever more so during the meteoric growth leading up to our publication deadline.
As we go to press, you can peek at the Public Timeline in two ways, neither of which appear anywhere in Twitter’s interface. The original link (http://twitter.com/public_timeline) still works for now. Rumor has it that you can also still access the timeline by running a search with no terms in the search box (http://twitter.com/#search?q=Search — thanks @krystyna81 for this tip!) So although the true Public Timeline is gone, for old time’s sake, we left this