Favrd
Anyone who doesn’t understand the service/site twitter.com that everyone is talking about, this site Favrd might help.
Twitter is like a blog but the messages (called “tweets”) are limited to only 140 characters of text and can be posted from mobile phones via text messages, little desktop apps & widgets, as well as a user’s custom page on the web site.
People can follow their friends, which will make those friends’ messages show on their page on the site, in that same app on their computer, or even back to their mobile phones.
It seems originally intended for people to post updates about what they’re doing that their friends and family might be interested in, like “have a cold, home sick today” or “cactus club was busy, went to milestones instead”, pretty much like status messages on facebook or instant messaging services. However, it seems to have degenerated into a general minimalist blog for the most part, with many people just trying to be funny and attracting the most followers. I think they need to add a classification system so users can separate their real friends & family from the celebrites and funny strangers they also follow. They haven’t done that yet, but one thing they do have is a feature where users can mark funny/interesting tweets they see as a “favorite”, which then puts them on a special saved list in their page on the website.
The site has an API meaning other websites have been made (“mashups”) that read tweets from twitter and do interesting things with them. For example, one that shows a random stream of tweets in real-time superimposed on a map of where they come from (I have a screen saver that does that too).
Favrd, pronounced “favoured” it seems, is another such mashup site. This one appears to collect some of the tweets of the day that several people have marked as favourites, showing them like a blog with newest tweets at the top. It’s little bit like how digg.com collects new weblinks with the most votes to it’s front page. So visiting Favrd gives you sense of the kind of tweets people are posting and seeing on twitter, however it apparently skews a bit towards the dirty jokes and oddball non-sequiturs (yes i’m talking about you, hotdogsladies).