December 2009
47 posts
Added a note to the FAQ to be very clear that you can opt out of having your tweets on Favstar and Favit.
I'm asking for help
Apple finally turned iTune’s updates on again today. As it turns out, a couple of factually inaccurate 1 star hate driven reviews have been left for Favit. One of them has been voted up to the top position in the store with 4 votes.
If you’ve used Favit and enjoy it, I’d greatly appreciate if you could open iTunes, mark this review as NOT helpful, and ‘report a...
Is the tumblr search usually broken, or is it just me (or my Google Chrome browser)?
In Which I Narrowly Avoid a Paranoid Twerk-out,...
girlvanized:
For the past month, abouts, I’ve noticed several people who regularly star my tweets but don’t follow me on Twitter, nor have me on any of their lists.
I was starting to wonder: “Do they…do they just go to my Twitter page every day, over and over, and star tweets? Why would someone do that? That makes no sense! Are they crazy persons? What the hell is going on?” And my eye would...
So, today was pretty depressing really. Of the 11.5k followers @favstar has over on twitter, there’s 20 - 50 who like the criticism without the constructive.
I’m thinking about setting up an advisory group. To 1) give feedback on new ideas, 2) to bring in some level heads to help me figure out how to handle abuse.
The ironic thing is that I expect over the next few days we’ll see more crass tweets on the leaderboards than ever before.
While a rating system is being built
Since day 1, favstar’s been incredibly liberal. Anything was okay for the leaderboards, there was no filtering based tweet content.
A couple of days ago the leaderboards had a much higher proportion of crass jokes than usual. In the interest of not overloading new visitors with buckets of X-rated content, I’ve added filtering of three words to the leaderboard pages.
There continues...
I think the Favstar feedback I’ve received from you guys posting on tumblr has been just as useful as the official feedback place over at http://feedback.favstar.fm. Thanks Guys!
If I believed ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’, there’d never have been a favstar in the first place.
@Twitter: “Twitter’s DNS records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We will update with more information soon.”
This means your passwords and other info are safe people.
Working on site outage
twitterstatus:
We are working to recovery from an unplanned downtime and will update more as we learn the cause of this outage.
Not even a fail whale in sight.
A tweet now appears on only one of the popular, rising, or new pages at a time. Tweets that make the popular page are no longer on the rising page.
Lots of people saying “more per page”. That will happen - likely Jan or Feb.
‘Popular’ tweets will be filtered off the ‘Rising’ page in the next week or so.
Snip of Tigerblade’s comment on my last post:
It’s not about competition, it’s about entertainment.
Daily Leaderboard? Probably not
I probably won’t be adding a daily leaderboard like Favrd had, for a few reasons:
1 day in an international environment is very confusing. When does it start, when does it end?
I know some people were saving up their best tweets to tweet at a particular time to make sure they got maximum exposure on Favrd’s daily leaderboard. I’d rather you were happy to tweet your best...
In a totally unrelated post, my current client project, the one that pays the mortgage and feeds the kids, is wrapping up. (iPhone app for NZ postal system)
I’m looking for a new web app/iPhone project to get involved with. Let me know if you hear of anything interesting.
Favit 1.1 will hit the appstore today
Nothing exciting, just bug fixes:
Using a non-alphanumeric character in your password now works.
You’re guided not to use your email address to log in.
The app will open and close more quickly - noticeable to iPhone 2G users if you’ve read 5000+ tweets in Favit.
The app saves it’s reading position more often, in case of it quitting unexpectedly (dead battery, dropping your...
Unexpected Pleasures
The leaderboard feels more polite to me now, without all those other faces on it, or specific star counts. Sure you can click on the date/time link to see the details, but unless you’re particularly interested, you don’t right?
You can enjoy the funny (or not) for what it is, and the person who wrote the tweet can watch the star count bubbling up on their recent page in private if...
I changed those words this morning, and within 60 minutes the 10 complaints per hour had disappeared.
To clarify, the premise was ‘the leaderboard should be funny’.
Well, that premise proved to be bullshit.
Learn anything?
New words?
You guys like words right? ’Funny’, ‘Likely’, and ‘Maybe’ were chosen in a bit of a rush this morning. What are some better words? They’ve got be short so they’ll fit on the iPhone buttons.
Many stars in the sky, and they're not all the...
trixieboots:
Yes, I really am taking a break. I’ve got more work than I know what to do with sitting in front of me and I need to get focused. But I have to get this out of my system before I sayonara.
I’ve been very uncomfortable about the conversations on Twitter and Tumblr around starring and Favrd’s demise, and I wanted to contribute in a way that I hope will be constructive. These...
Morning tweaks. Like em?
coyotesqrl:
favstar:
Premise: Leaderboards should attempt to show funny tweets only.
Whose definition of funny?
Ideally? When you are viewing the leaderboard, yours.
Premise: Leaderboards should attempt to show funny tweets only.
The leaderboards need a restructure.
What's Leo trying to say?
Hello Mr. Emailer, you made my night.
Hello Mr. Haines,
I just wanted to drop you a line from the email address I use most often (I just sent a five spot your way from my PayPal using my real name, *****) and let you know that I thoroughly enjoy your website. I’m not an iPhone user, but if I was, I’d certainly be using Favit as well.
I especially appreciate your willingness to listen to creative feedback and have noted...
1 tag
Reflection
This morning I think I recognized the second meaning in ‘shitty approximation’. One meaning is a barbed insult, the other is more significant. If Dean could have been more open about it, perhaps he wouldn’t have felt he needed to shut down his site this week.
It’s a shame Dean couldn’t have played more nicely. I’ve DM’ed several times with @ono_matope...
At this young stage in growth, 300 people can be very important. Especially if they are the mavens that lead people.
1 tag
Some people use the ‘favorite’ feature as a bookmark - especially tech people.
Why?
I try and keep this tumblr blog either positive or constructive. Both whenever possible.
Today’s events are worth explaining. Summary:
24 hours ago @beep posted a greasemonkey script to make Favstar look almost exactly like Favrd. Yes, it alters favstar.fm in your browser to change the way it looks. GreaseMonkey scripts are mostly used by geeks, but 270+ people have installed this one....
