Stars are the currency of twitter
*I wrote this a long time ago when I was new to favstar and I and a lot of friends had no clue how it works. If it helps you figure things out, as it did for us, then I’m glad*
All tweets in twitter have a little invisible star on their top right. If you run your cursor over this star you can click it and give the tweet a gold star. Making it your favourite. This will then go into your favourites list on the right under your profile information and you can see it at any time.
(If you’re using new twitter the favourite (star) button is located UNDER the tweet. Right next to the time the tweet was posted)
Favstar collects these stars.
BUT you need to sign up to www.favstar.fm and follow @favstar. This makes it easier for your stars to be collected.
You can also read the favstar blog here on tumblr. Which will help.
You can also ask him anything you like, if you’re on favstar. He’s also really helpful via email. God only knows where he finds the time.
Getting down to business.
Star what you like.
Star what you think is funny.
Star what you think deserves it.
Star direct from favstar if you can, it works better. Quite often, stars from twitter don’t stick.
If you want to find funny people to follow, check out the favstar leaderboard. http://favstar.fm/recent_most_faved/100-favorites It’s a goldmine of cool people to follow. Don’t expect them to follow you back though.
Don’t forget the 10, 30, and 50 sections of the leaderboard. There are some cool people there who don’t quite make the popular page due to lack of followers, but who totally deserve to.
http://favstar.fm/recent_most_faved/50-favorites
http://favstar.fm/recent_most_faved/30-favourites
http://favstar.fm/recent_most_faved/10-favourites
There are some rules to getting on the leaderboard… The idea is to collect a certain amount of stars in a certain time period. Getting stars on a tweet quickly gives it a chance to get on the leaderboard.
The leaderboard is organized by the amount of stars on each tweet.
As soon as you get your 10th star (assuming you’re within the time constraints), same thing with the 30, 50, and 100 boards; as soon as you get more stars, you move up to that respective board. You’re on the popular board for as long as it takes for people to come in behind you and push you off the bottom. (Thanks to @theJoeBiz for that explanation)
Now if you don’t want your leaderboards censored, with such scandalous words as sex, breasts, fuck etc filtered from view, you will have to go to favstar.fm and opt out of the nanny state in your settings. If you don’t opt out, all tweets containing vaguely scandalous words will be filtered.
As for following people from favstar, you can do it one of two ways. Under each avatar there is a blue follow button. If you press this you it links directly to twitter. If you want to add the person to your favstar.fm list click on their ava which will take you to their favstar.fm page. And on the top bar you can see a button which will let you add them to your list. Which the app helpfully creates for you.
You’ll probably hear about the crawler, once you’re into favstar. The crawler deepmines twitter for stars. It crawls followers first, then their followers. But it’s expensive to run. So starring direct from favstar will always be better.
PLUS to have the crawler collect from you, you need to have already starred 20 tweets. And have received at least one star yourself. Otherwise you don’t exist to the crawler.
Sometimes you see a tweet from a friend that hasn’t made it to favstar from twitter yet. Because only tweets with a minimum of one star make it across. Favstar has a great oneclick system that you can add to your bookmarks. (Favstar.fm page top right, next to the FAQs) If I want to star something I click on the tweet, click my bookmark link, and the tweet heads straight to favstar where I can star it.
Other than that @theJoeBiz has made a great favstar app that works in firefox/chrome. Check it out here http://bit.ly/favlink (firefox) or http://tinyurl.com/2bahnha (chrome). It’s seriously brilliant. I use it daily. Following him isn’t a bad idea either, as he’s pretty funny.
Then… we can talk about paying for extra features :) This opens up the option of choosing a tweet of the day, setting up custom notifications, having access to a more option on pages, and helps favstar cover server costs without resorting to putting ads on the site. http://favstar.fm/bonus_features
But let’s just get you started. Baby steps.
p.s. feel free to check out this from @goldengateblond too
