Even before Twitter's recent aggressive behavior towards developers I would have expected this to get shut down. If this became something widely used Twitter value to me would decline. The entire favorite feature would just start to be ignored by a majority of users.
I agree, it's a social hack of sorts that he's using for advertisement, which is cool, but abuse of it would render favorites meaningless and it would become spam. However, I could see how if @pepsi wanted to favorite a tweet by @averagejoe because it said 'this new pepsi can is awesome!' it would seem legitimate enough and not spammy.
Yeah, savvy companies are getting away from the annoying "RT every nice thing people say about my company" with 'fave it and then point the faves at people if they want testimonials". Hostgator does this well: http://twitter.com/hostgator/favorites
I don't understand what you mean by "point the faves at people if they want testimonials". Looks to me like they're just favoriting positive feedback that is sent to them
I don't think the feature itself would be ignored. His service doesn't destroy the usefulness of favoriting itself.
It would however cause users to start ignoring Twitter messages/notifications. People are already ignoring responses from people they don't know, and it can get even worse if we think most people interacting with us are just bots.
Favoriting is now a misnomer. In practice, its value is as Facebook's "like" button on a post. That is, to signal to the other person. So yes, it destroys the usefulness of favoriting.
> His service doesn't destroy the usefulness of favoriting itself.
On the contrary - it does. Because the point of "favoriting" is that when my tweet is favorited, I expect that the other party liked it. Now that's not true anymore, since it could have just been a bot who performed that action based on keyword-targeting me, not by judging that the tweet has a value to be favorited.
