January 2012
1 post
Friday 13th special - 1 month of Favstar Bonus...
Would you like to try Favstar Bonus Features? Today you can get 1 month’s bonus features for $5. It’s limited to 20 people. :-) Details here: http://bit.ly/zb997J
December 2011
2 posts
The missing favs and retweets
Update: Twitter wanted me to mention that Sitestreams is a beta product.
Favstar uses a technology from Twitter called Sitestreams to collect favorites and retweets. When it’s working, it works very well, and favs and retweets for hundreds of thousands of users are delivered in real-time.
Unfortunately over the last 24 hours, Twitter had an interruption to their @sitestreams system that...
November 2011
2 posts
UX and Web Designer - Part-time
Favstar.fm is looking for a designer to help with several mini-projects over the coming months. We’re aiming to retain someone for 15 hours a month for 4 months, with a high chance of extension.
You’ll collaborate on concepts, work on the wireframes, produce high fidelity prototypes in photoshop, and cut the designs into html and css. The projects will be small and discrete, with...
Plagio: Cómo lidiar con un plagiario en Twitter.
Cada semana me avisan de alguien que copia los tuits de otra persona sin darle crédito. A veces es un neófito en Twitter con 10 seguidores que de veras no entiende que eso está mal, otras veces son usuarios con más de 100, 000 seguidores que a sabiendas roban buenos tuits para ser retuiteados y obtener nuevos seguidores.
Muchos usuarios de Favstar pasan tiempo puliendo sus tuits y su personaje, y...
August 2011
1 post
NSFW tweets on Favstar. Opt-in if you want 'em
Favstar now gives you the choice if you want to see NSFW tweets or not. Visit your settings page if you’d like to see NSFW tweets, and look for the checkbox at the bottom.
July 2011
1 post
June 2011
3 posts
502 Bad Gateway
I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ve fixed the 502 Bad Gateway’s. Please do let me know (via Twitter) if you see one over the next couple of days.
What's happening with missed deletes, favs, and...
Over the last couple of weeks, Favstar has missed deleting some tweets that users have deleted on Twitter, and has sometimes missed collecting a retweet or favorite.
It’s become my top priority to get this resolved, and I’d like to share a little more detail about what’s going on, and what’s being done about it.
The way that Favstar receives information from Twitter...
Deleted Tweets
Something’s happened with Favstar not correctly deleting tweets that are deleted from Twitter. I’ve added some instrumentation to figure out what’s going on.
If after reading this, you delete a new tweet from Twitter, and it’s not removed from Favstar, and the ID is a bigger number than 80692683324145665, please let me know.
For tweets that don’t get correctly...
March 2011
1 post
Faved by and Retweeted By
I’ve heard from a few new users that are using the Faved By and Retweeted By screens to count how many favs they’ve received, or how many times they’ve been retweeted.
These pages don’t work for that purpose.
The Faved By and Retweeted By screens only consider your 100 most recent faved/retweeted tweets. This means the numbers shown on these pages will fluctuate.
...
February 2011
2 posts
Offering Promotion to Bonus Feature Users
Next week Favstar is going to start promoting users with the Bonus Features a little more. It’s going to be kept subtle, so that users with Bonus Features are shown in appropriate places. They won’t be flashing with neon lights on the top of the home page, but will appear in a couple of spots.
I surveyed some of the users with the Bonus Features earlier, and 95% said they were...
January 2011
1 post
December 2010
8 posts
jusky: 2010 →
jusky:
I’ll tell you what happened to me this year that I never would have believed could happen:
I have internet friends.
Like, really.
I’m not a Star Trek fan and I don’t live in my mom’s basement. I have real life friends. But a funny thing happened to me this year. I really tried to be funny on…
1 tag
Link to your Tumblr blog from your Favstar profile
You can now link to your Tumblr blog from your http://favstar.fm profile. Use the settings page to enter the link to your blog.
You can also link to your Flickr account, your personal website, your LinkedIn profile, your Facebook page (I dear you), or whatever you want.
Drop me a note if you use this - good feature?
A question for people with Bonus Features
When you have the bonus features on Favstar, the right column features the first 30 people that you’ve added to your Favstar List (see pic). I know that some people haven’t added anyone to their list, and others have added more than 500.
I’m curious, approximately how many people have you added?
See everyone who fav'ed a tweet
In Old Favstar, if a tweet was favorited by hundreds of people, you could only see the first 300 who faved it. Now, if you view the tweet on it’s own page, you can see everyone who faved it (or retweeted it).
For example: http://favstar.fm/users/iamnotdiddy/status/5828988483
Tip: To get a single tweet to appear on it’s own page, click on the timestamp below the tweet text.
Mwuh ha ha ha!
November 2010
4 posts
Clarifying the intent of the Leaderboard
I’ve been asked to write rules around the leaderboard. Rules are stodgy, and the leaderboard concept is pretty simple. With a little common sense I expected everyone would realize faving and retweeting your own tweets in order to promote them to the leaderboard is generally not acceptable. Almost everyone does realize this.
Never-the-less, I would like to remove confusion if it does...
Retweeting your own Tweet to get it on the Home...
Is it okay or not okay to retweet your own tweet (with a second account) to get it on to the Favstar home page? Please explain as well as a yes/no. Your thoughts?
Thank you, early supporters. Your bonus features...
Favstar.fm started offering bonus features in May 2010. I’m humbled that over 400 people have now purchased them. This has covered the cost of hosting the servers over the last year, and given me confidence to keep investing my time and improving the service.
To say thank you to the earliest supporters. I’ve just extended your bonus features by 2 months if you purchased them in May...
October 2010
1 post
I made some changes to improve the reliability of the @favstar50 and @favstar_bot announcements. Please let me know if it still misses some.
September 2010
4 posts
Had anyone purchased the Favstar bonus features to help themselves get on to the leaderboards? I’m surprised if there’s a yes, and would like to understand, because none of the features were designed to do that. If that was the reason you bought them, how did it work for you?
Removing RT requirements from new and rising
A good nights sleep can do wonders for clarity. I think I’ve figured out something that works for everyone who’s expressed dissatisfaction with the recent leaderboard changes, and also works for Favstar going forward.
Sometime in the next couple of days, I’ll be returning the new and rising leaderboard requirements to what they were - 10 stars and 30 stars, with no RT...
1 tag
Would anyone really mind if I shut the new and rising leaderboards down?
1 tag
A map to the exit
If you want to get off Favstar, you can easily ask. You don’t need to make tweets like these.
August 2010
2 posts
Bonus features get a small upgrade
Everyone can now see the ‘more’ button on popular and recent pages of users who have signed up for the bonus features. This means that people who take the time to craft and publish great tweets, can have more people reading their best material.
Until now, only people with the bonus features could see the more button on the bottom of user’s pages, and on leaderboard pages.
If...
July 2010
3 posts
“When life gives you melons you probably have dyslexia.”
– -@SamGrittner (via kissmeimlazy)
Favstar - the future
So, I’m making some plans for Favstar’s future right now. Some things are going to change to make it a more custom, personal experience for users - but it’s too early for details.
I’m also going to remove the necessity to follow @favstar to see additional statistics. That helped Favstar in the early days, but it’s no longer relevant.
I asked yesterday if many...
May 2010
11 posts
Word filters
Small point that came up in discussions was having a list of words that stopped a tweet being shown on the leaderboard. I’ve been thinking about removing this recently, but I figure I’d cop too much flak if I removed the filter then reintroduced it again because the leaderboards returned to being 75% penis and vagina jokes. I know, I know. Some damn funny material misses the...
Catching up on Tumblr posts I’ve missed over the last week or so. Seems there were quite a few Favstar related discussions that Tumblr search completely failed to show. Were there any posts I shouldn’t miss?
Introducing Tweet of the Day
There’s a new feature on Favstar. See that little trophy icon over on the right? Well, if you’ve opted in to the extra features, you can click the trophy to choose the tweet as your ‘Tweet of the Day’.
Naturally, you can only choose one tweet per day, as your Tweet of the Day. When you do choose one, two things happen right now. It gets tweeted by @FavstarOfTheDay:
...
@SMOKE_FieldMob
So, @SMOKE_FieldMob has been plagiarizing tweets. I have screenshots of one person’s help requests they filed with Twitter - from last year. Has anyone followed the process and filed some recently?
Discouraging rapid starring
Favstar has something new. If you star via the site, it will ask you to slow down if you star tweets within 3 seconds of each other. When first launched it was 4 seconds.
This is to discourage people from fav’ing a bunch of tweets without reading them. For a long time Favstar has had users who would visit someone’s page, and star a bunch of tweets without reading them. I want to...
Make it available
Since late last year I’ve had some pretty cool features in Favstar that I haven’t released. I’ve really really wanted to, but things have kept getting in the way. First there was Favit, the iPhone app. Then there was the crawler rebuild, and then the server migration (which I just completed and I’m stoked with!)
Apart from the distractions, my inability to release these...
April 2010
1 post
Sigh
March 2010
12 posts
Favstar’s crawling favs much faster today, consistently. Is it noticeable?