Yesterday I read the news that Twitter was going to start sending email notifications for retweets and favorites. Clearly the reason they’re doing this is directly related to their other announcement yesterday, which is that Twitter hasn’t done a great job of getting people to come back to Twitter.com. I remember long ago thinking about how odd it was that Twitter had this @ reply mechanism of communication but that if you didn’t use a third-party app you’d never know if you were messaged that way without proactively checking. The ability of Twitter apps to let you know when you’ve been mentioned, retweeted or favorited has made them extremely sticky and preferable for frequent Twitter users.
So for retweets I actually think this is a good thing and is especially interesting because the new & official retweet mechanism doesn’t trigger @ reply notifications in most third-party apps (Tweetdeck being an exception). But for favorites I find this a little annoying because I use favorites as a bookmarking mechanism for links to check out later (it’s one less step than opening the link in a browser and then adding to Instapaper). So I don’t like the idea of triggering these favorite notifications to people when I don’t really consider their tweet a “favorite” so I’ll probably stop using favorites this way.
Lastly, I also found it interesting that in the official tweet from @twitter they stated that these notifications were triggered by retweets or favorites from “someone you follow”. However the screenshot above is from a favorite notification I got from @eventbrite … but I don’t follow @eventbrite. So maybe they didn’t really mean it?
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