A new way to favourite on Twitter: Collections
The recent change from stars to hearts on Twitter aroused a great deal of furore. Many users hated the change for a variety of reasons – some users thought hearts “cissy”, others think ‘Likes’ are a Facebook thing.
Some users, like me, felt that Favorite and Like are different things. I used the Favorite feature (the stars) to “bookmark” or clip tweets that looked interesting and to which I would like to come back. That’s not quite the same thing as “liking” a tweet. I like your tweet when I agree with you or like what you said: I favourite when I want to remember what you said and quote it elsewhere, or to follow the link you provided, or to follow up your topic with you when I have time. There’s a difference, isn’t there?
Now there’s a feature – in Twitter’s Tweetdeck app at least – that allows that nuanced use. Collections allow you to curate a collection of tweets into a timeline. Each collection is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share, follow and embed. You can drag tweets into the collection (a quick and easy way to transfer them from your Likes list if you have adjacent columns in Tweetdeck) or add them via their URL.
I can just have a collection of Helen’s Favourites, or Stuff To Return To, or start categorising them straightaway. My first collections (in progress) are Flipped Learning and Gamification. Love the idea that I can have several collections, for every purpose. Some I will even set via IFTTT.com to save to Evernote as a permanent archive :)
I was very sorry when the stars turned into hearts, but my Twitter star has come out again!