Favrd

» see favrd.textism.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2008 the star on a tweet did nothing. You could favorite a post and it went into a list nobody read, with no counter on the tweet itself and no way to find what anyone else had starred. Favrd read those stars across the whole service and put them in order, most-favorited at the top, refreshed through the day. It was one page. The first link to it on Hacker News, on 19 May 2008, called it trickle-down egonomics for the Twitter attention span.

It was written by Dean Allen, a Canadian living in southwest France who had already given the web more than his share: the writing site Textism and the publishing system Textpattern, with a hosting company called TextDrive before either. Favrd lived at textism.com and then at favrd.textism.com, which is why the favrd.com domain in the archive is nothing but a redirect with no page behind it.

What it actually built was a canon. The leaderboard sorted strangers by whether other people found them funny, so the same handful of accounts kept surfacing, and the people in that handful started reading each other. Merlin Mann and Jeffrey Zeldman were in there. The compressed deadpan that English-language Twitter ran on for the next ten years was being worked out on that page by people who had found each other through a counter.

~ the case file ~

~ the scoreboard problem ~

A ranking changes the thing it ranks. Once there was a public order of merit, people wrote for the order of merit, and the jokes started arriving tuned to it. Allen watched that happen to a page he had built in an afternoon as a curiosity.

When he closed it he wrote that the stars had turned into take-out menus hung on the doors of other restaurants, which is as exact a description of reciprocal favoriting as anyone has managed. He described what was left as fuel for a kind of emotional damage dressed up as a game. That was his own site he was talking about.

~ the exit note ~

It went dark on Sunday 6 December 2009, without a deprecation window or an export tool. John Gruber posted it to Daring Fireball the same day under the headline "Dean Allen Pulls the Plug on Favrd". Adweek ran it the next day and described the shutdown as sudden, which it was.

The note Allen left was not bitter about the writing. There were still clever things to read every day, he said, but finding them was "no longer a challenge", because by late 2009 you already followed your sources. Then: "Favrd may have been a toy, but it was a toy that made friends. That's a hell of a thing." The archive keeps one capture of the page after that, a 1,385-byte file from April 2010, and then the address stops answering.

~ what came after ~

Favstar.fm had launched in July 2009 doing the same job with a longer memory and a paid tier that let you hand somebody a trophy. It inherited the audience within weeks and ran until Twitter deprecated the streaming API in June 2018. Twitter itself eventually absorbed the idea and put a visible count on every post, then renamed the star to a heart in 2015.

Dean Allen died in January 2018, a few months before Favstar's own shutdown notice. Textpattern is still maintained and still shipping, currently at version 4.9.1.

Turkey in 2008 was not on Twitter. The country's internet was still forums and MSN, and the people who would later make Turkish Twitter what it became were a few years out from arriving. Favrd's entire world was English-language and mostly American, designers and writers who already knew each other's work.

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