Twitter Favorites is like that barking dog. You aren’t sure how to deal with it, and keep looking for some obedience classes to tame ‘the beast’.
I “favorite” several quality Tweets that I see come through my Twitter stream. Especially when I am out traveling I do this a lot.
Often I see a Tweet that I want to dig deeper into, but just don’t have the time to give it the proper attention right away.
Twitter allows you to Favorite Tweets that come through your Twitter stream. This is all fine and dandy, the only problem with Twitter Favorites is that the only option Twitter provide is to store Favorites sequential by default.
Google Reader To The Rescue
Since Twitter or 3rd party products don’t offer options at the moment to organize your Twitter Favorites we need to be a little creative.
Twitter has one option that is really great – you can subscribe to your Twitter Favorite RSS Feed.
1. Find your Twitter Favorites
You can find your Twitter Favorites two ways:
a. Type the url for your Twitter Favorites in your browser: http://twitter.com/TwtrCoach/favorites
b. Log into your Twitter account and in the right column click on Favorites
For both options there will be a RSS link in the right column that says RSS feed of Username’s favorites.
2. Click on this link and add your Twitter Favorite feed to Google Reader
Google Reader is a free RSS reader if you have not signed up for it yet.
And also if you use iPhone then search and download the free MobileRSS application.
3. Find the Subscription for your Twitter Favorite RSS feed
Open Google Reader and look for Subscriptions in left column. If you did subscribe to your Twitter Favorite RSS feed you should see a feed that says Twitter / Favorites from Username.
4. Create a Twitter Favorite folder
If you click on your new subscription Twitter / Favorites from Username you should now have a window showing you the stream of your Twitter Favorites.
Here your click on the option that says Feed settings…
Then there will come up a drop down menu, here you will look for New Folder. Then create a folder that you call Twitter Favorites.
This way your RSS feed will automatically be assigned to the new folder.
5. Tag your Favorite Tweets
The next thing you now want to do is to click on Expanded in your RSS stream window. You will now see the Tweet, how it looked like when you originally favorited it with additional options from Google Reader.
One of the options you will see below the Tweet is Add Tags. Here you can add different tags separated by commas. The tags are used to organize your Tweets. I use more then one tag. If Darren Rowse aka @Problogger tweets a blog tip then I can use tags like; problogger, blog tips.
Your tags will show in the right column under Subscriptions.
One tip here is to use unique tags – don’t use name of an existing folder.
6. Take it one step farther
When you are in the window of your RSS stream under the Tweet select the option Send to. You will then see that you have the option to send your favorite Tweet to either Delicious, Friendfeed or Posterous.
I send mine to Delicious where I can also add tags to it, and Friendfeed is set up to pick up when I do a Social Bookmark at Delicious.
And then I send it to my Posterous which is my extended Rambling blog.
Not only did I tame ‘the beast’ but my neighbors comes and ask me what I did.
What have you done to tame your ‘beast’?
@dawntrenee
Thank you so much for the wonderful information. I find sorting and organizing of any nature to be the hardest part of the social networking world.
Looking forward to trying out this beast tamer!
@TwtrCoach
You are welcome Dawn.
Google Reader is a wonderful tool. And at the moment there is no other good options for organize my favorites. I use Favorites a lot so this is a very handy way to find great info.
Cheers.. Are
@juaron
For me it wasn’t so much the tweets themselves as the links inside that I wanted to be able to save, especially when using Twitter on my mobile phone. For some time I have tried to use Twitter’s favorites for that, but I just couldn’t get a satisfying workflow with them.
In my “normal” browsing I use Instapaper to save links for later reading and Delicious for permanent bookmarking. Since I do not own an iPhone, but use a Nokia N95 for my mobile browsing, I couldn’t find a Twitter app that supported these services. So I built my own (http://twimply.com), and I find this does suit my needs.
I usually skim through my tweets on my mobile, save the links that seem interesting to Instapaper, and read those later when I’m on a desktop. There I decide whether I want to save them permanently to Delicious. I find this works easier than using Twitter’s favorites…
@umcle
This is a fantastic tip! I have over 2000 tweets that I fave’d over the past year and I basically gave up on trying to go back and determine which was useful or relevant. This solves my problem. Thanks!
One question – is there a way to mass delete my old favorites?
@favorious
Very Interesting post. You might like a service we just launched called Favorious (http://favorious.com) and is solely basedy on Twitter favorites.
It aggregates the favorites and enables you to search them, find the most popular ones and explore them in various ways. You can also see what individual users have been favoriting (which can also be done as described in this post) and which of their/your tweets have been favorited (not available on twitter.com).
We aim to add functionality so you can tag your favorites and, of course, export them to the various bookmarking services (well, at least the favorites that have links in them).
The Favorious Team