(AUTHOR'S NOTE: None of this happened. Skip to end for update. Overall point is still interesting so read for that. Or don't because maybe this blog post doesn't exist. Maybe I'm not real. Maybe I'm just another dumb Internet meme sucking up your time)
Ross Luippold over at Huffington Post Comedy has a great replay of the Twitter interactions between comedian Kyle Kinane and Pace Foods that went down this weekend. The exchange centers on the fact that Pace was auto-favoriting tweets mentioning its product, and that made for the favoriting of pretty ridiculous tweets.
It all started when stand-up comedian Kyle Kinane, who counts the likes of Patton Oswalt and Marc Maron as fans, noticed that the Twitter account for Pace favorited a 10-month old tweet insulting their salsa.
Left unsaid in Ross's overview and underpinning why such exchanges were funny in the first place are two basic problems in the design and architecture of Twitter. Allow me to elaborate/rant at length.
First, "favorite" has always been the wrong term for that Twitter action.
"Favorite" implies enjoyment and endorsement of content that stands out above the rest for being not just noteworthy but good. Orange is my favorite color. Kale is my favorite vegetable. Non-conflicted black republicans are my favorite non-existent political group. However, people don't actually use the Twitter feature to mean this in all cases. Often we're just remembering, marking, saving, flagging, storing, bookmarking or otherwise more neutrally noting a tweet. We are long overdue for Twitter to change the verb from favorite to something more neutral.
Know where else we've seen the misuse of verbs in social media? Facebook. "Like" needs to become something else. I don't "Like" when a friend posts that his uncle has just died. I empathize. I feel. I support. I don't like. It's especially problematic with Facebook Pages. I don't like Mitt Romney. I chose to follow his page to keep tabs on what he was up to (someone had to). A like is not an endorsement.
And don't get me started on "friend." Facebook has done more to destroy the meaning of the world "friend" than all the rumor-spreading, backstabbing, and two-faced behavior of the world's people combined.
There's something odd about these social platforms being so neutral in so many of their operations (seemingly) in that they don't endorse movements per se; they want to get out of the way and let users express themselves. Yet they force a non-neutral stance on every user when they make language choices such as favorite, friend, like across a set of interactions that can and do mean so much more than that. Facebook takes the cake because it has forced us into "liking" brands then goes back and sells our likeness in an ad for that brand saying we actually like the brand! Way to juke the stats, Facebook.
Second, favoriting activity is public and social if your Twitter account is public. This is overly simplistic and bad.
In the Security and Privacy section of your Twitter account settings, you're allowed to make your entire account private. You can also choose to conceal the location of your tweets and determine if people can even find you on Twitter based on your mobile number or email address. Twitter could, and I think should, add an option to keep your favorites private. There's a role for you keeping a secret file of tweets you want to come back to. No doubt part of the decision to keep this activity public is to drive more activity. Favoriting is an entirely new category of interaction the company can track, report, and use to populate activity streams. Many people use Twitter in a read-only mode. Favoriting lives in the gray area between true lurker behavior and posting tweets like an addict (aka me). The added twist is that while the word and button design of Favorite on Twitter has remained the same, its meaning has changed dramatically.
Favorites used to only be visible for folks who visited your profile page and explicitly clicked on your favorites. They were technically public but practically hidden if not invisible. Now they act more like a mention, proactively alerting (snitching to?) the party whose tweet you've favorited about what you've done.
