Twitter’s running an experiment that turns favourites into retweets

The favourite feature on Twitter has always been kind of an oddball. People use it for different things — either to acknowledge a mention, a good joke, or a bookmark. A virtual hat-tip if you will.

Recently however, some Twitter users have been reporting tweets favourited by their followers on their timelines, the same way a retweet would. Peter Kafka from Re/code grabbed a screenshot of his timeline:

Twitter filling my feed with stuff I didn't ask for – stuff other people follow and fav. pic.twitter.com/IVOViGF1QW

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) August 17, 2014

Favourites are kind of private. Although you can see the amount of yellow stars a tweet have received, you can’t see the specific user unless you click for more details or go to the specific user’s activity board. This means that your timeline will generally stay clean.

Twitter is known for running experiments. Last year it released a blog post stating, “It’s rare for a day to go by when we’re not releasing at least one experiment.” Like most internet companies do, Twitter experiments with various features — many of which might not become a fixed feature.

The blue bird is right there, Facebook has been in the news lately with its social experiments, which was not all great for readers. How long this will last and what will come of it remains to be seen.

On the interesting side of things, when it comes Twitter experiments, cool features like the Event Parrot you can follow that DMs you breaking news, or the ability to embed tweets within tweets.

Have your favourites been turned into the retweets by this latest experiment?