An Alternative to RTs on Twitter

Twitter-SPAM is on the rise, and I include RTs (re-tweets) in the SPAM bucket.

I made a snarky remark about this a couple days back – and sure enough, it got re-tweeted.

To mix my metaphors, RTs increase the noise part of the signal to noise ratio in what can already be a rather noisy echo chamber. They make me want to read/use Twitter less.

There is an alternative to this madness!

Twitter has a Favorites feature. Like a tweet? Mark it as a favorite. Here are mine.

You can get your favorites (or someone elses) in a JSON or RSS format, and do something interesting with them. Add them to your life stream, tumblog, FriendFeed, etc.1 This gives people an option to subscribe to that data, without cluttering your Twitter stream with the constant squawking of a parrot.

I follow you on Twitter because I’m interested in what you have to say. The more your Twitter stream is polluted by RTs, the less likely I am to keep following you.

  1. Yes, it would be cool to be able to get your friend’s Favorites in your update stream – I hope Twitter adds an option for this on a per user basis. [back]