Twitterfeedback

A little frustrated at Khoi’s anti-spam tech — it doesn’t work (“Sorry, there was an error: Too many comments have been submitted from you in a short period of time. Please try again in a short while.” Been trying a few days now.) — so I’ve been forced to post my reply to his post on Twitter here:

Twitter is deceptively simple. It presents itself as “what are you doing right now?” but it’s really just about inventive ways of getting small, immediate bits of text around with some social-network expressions (i.e., you can make your own posts private if all you want is a closed circle, although there is a bit of a social hole present if your friend’s twitters aren’t private as well).

As usual, people — including Twitter — are finding more inventive uses this “alert” system, such as the Macworld Reports user and the (unofficial) CNN Breaking News user. As an SMS user, I know these kinds of news alerts already exists, but not only is the Twitter system easier to use and manage for this sort of thing, but again, it allows me to move that content easily to other forms, such as reading it on the website only, or getting it in my instant messenger client.

Slightly rewritten from the comment left in their blog:

The fact that the Top 10 Favorite Twitters list itself allows things to be “favorited” means the list is almost never going to change.

By nature these are some of the most interesting public statuses available, plus people starting on the site who are first learning about favorites are encouraged to favorite these — thereby keeping them on the list indefinitely. I call it the “Kittie factor” (after the band that signed a record deal because they stayed on the mp3.com Top 10 list).

If your Top 10 list is going to be anything interesting for return visitors, you need a timeline window, as in “Top Favorites in the last 48 hours,” and a different mechanism that encourages more activity — and as I’ve pointed out, since favorites are a bookmark mechanism and stores them in your account for posterity, using it as a high-volume voting mechanism would ruin that feature.