Thank You Twitter, Now Please Don’t Screw Up The Fav Star
More on Ferguson, with thoughts on how Twitter has become an invaluable resource.
I remember back when I used to complain about Twitter. Actions to rid themselves of third party developers. The #DickBar: the most hideous thing to hit software since Windows ME.
Now? I’m thankful Twitter exists.
Facebook is a reality of happiness and celebration. Lives you should want to want to vicariously live, animals you want to adopt, and weddings you have mixed opinions of. Katie Rose Pipkin’s post on scamming Facebook to actually share controversial posts has some great ideas in it.
Facebook’s newsfeed is not the accurate translation of your friends’ shared activity. The Newsfeed actually has two versions: Most Recent & Top Stories. You’re more likely to see the actual flow of content with Most Recent, but Facebook loves to randomly kick you back over to Top Stories.
Twitter, on the other hand, has yet to ruin their product.
It’s still a simple ticker of updates posted by the people you follow. Nobody controls what lands there except for you and twitter’s advertisers.
Of course, this is all inspired by the last eight days in Ferguson, MO.
Without Twitter, public awareness of the truth on the ground would be even lesser during this neverending-darkest-moment-in-decades.
Twitter is where we distribute live feed links from citizen journalists, because The New York Times is parroting the police.
Listening to CNN and their ilk, you’d think aggression is originating with the protestors.
Follow the reporters on the ground, and the story is different:
Twitter has been a place to hear the sides of the story not reported. Twitter’s RT is a much better version of Facebook’s Share, and it leads to learning.
Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman said it best in episode 1 of their Call Your Girlfriend podcast: You Will Be Judged for Your RTs.
A live stream of the trickling information included:
— The police releasing the video footage of someone who may be Michael Brown stealing 48 dollars worth of cigars, did so against Federal wishes.
— The officer who shot Michael Brown six times did not know Michael Brown was a suspect in said theft.
— To realize said footage from the cigar shop was likely released to tamper and taint the eventual jury pools.
Any jurors, during voir dire — the interviews to filter out those unfit to serve — who have seen that video will be barred from serving. Seeing as how many have seen that video, it may be next to impossible to fill a jury.
Unfortunately, this post is being written because of what Twitter’s experimenting with.
A background: Fav Stars are little gold stars that you can give someone’s tweets. Yes, just like we’re in elementary school. They’re arguably Twitter’s equivalent of Facebook’s Like button.
Twitter is experimenting with a new feed function to rip this god-like control out of your pure, innocent, OCD-hands, in favor of showing you content only tangentially related to who you follow.
That feed function is based around putting the Fav Starred posts from other users into your feed.
I’m burying this all down here, because the change (as it is described) only adds content into your feed. It doesn’t obfuscate or hide or anything else. If Twitter decides to be more like Facebook, well, that’s a blog post I’m hoping to avoid writing.
Margarita, from her post, on why this is a good thing:
My argument in support of the new functionality is simple. If you are forced to see new tweets that are purely in the control of who you follow, you will learn more 1) about the behavior of people you follow and 2) have another entry point to communities you do not know about or even like on Twitter.
The obvious problem with this is that we already have RTs for this function. Therefore, users see RTs for sharing and educating, but Fav Stars grew into something else. They’re a “thanks,” or even a “nice photo.”
Fav stars are for fun, they’re not serious co-sign badges of approval.
Twitter has so far demonstrated a pretty good understanding of why people use their service, I hope that continues.
