notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

(via atsween)

Dean Allen seems upset. Unfortunately, I find favrd is as shitty as the newcomers tweetorites and favstar.fm, because my stream is private, so none of them can be persuaded I exist. At least the otherwise appalingly garish favstar tells me why I am apparently so unpopular.

Now, I’ll admit that, as with Microplaza, supporting private users is tricky, but it’s possible - set up an account associated with the site and follow private users so you can see what’s going on.

Fundamentally, though, the whole model that all these sites work on is a monstrous hack. Unlike Flickr¹, Twitter has no public mechanism to find out which of your posts have been marked as a favourite, so all these services pull down RSS for many users, looking to see which status updates get marked. Naturally, this isn’t exhaustive; if someone they’re not tracking (like a private user, sigh, or someone new) adds something, it’s ignored. Of course it’s also horrifically inefficient.

It’s even more annoying to find that a few select users do actually have this feature within Twitter itself, but it’s not exposed. Here’s an example.

Hopefully one day Twitter will stop growing stupidly fast and their engineers can spend some time, you know, adding features. Features like exposing favourites (which might even help eliminate the scourges of “retweeting” and trending topics). I’m not holding my breath, though. In the meantime, it’s tempting to take my account public just so I can use all the third-party apps that don’t cater for private users.

¹ Flickr’s Recent Activity shows you favourites. It doesn’t have an API method, but I can live with that when the site shows it.