Twitter's latest experiment lets you favorite users on Android

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http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/30/5257480/twitter-account-favoriting-android-experiment-push-notifications

Twitter's experiment with promoting its Favorite button seems to have worked, and now it's looking to see what else the button can do. The company's latest experiment involves letting users favorite accounts — not just tweets — and can be found inside the most recent version of its Android app. Favoriting an account won't do much just yet, but it will begin sending you push notifications whenever that person tweets. The new experiment was originally spotted by Yahoo's Drew Olanoff.

Twitter already offers push notifications for tweets, albeit buried inside a menu on user profiles. But the company has frequently experimented with re-launching features, and favoriting is likely no different. Most recently, Direct Messages were resuscitated as one of Twitter's most prominent features after having long been regarded as an afterthought. Favoriting an account isn't being positioned quite as front-and-center just yet though: for better or worse, turning on push notifications or favoriting a user's account doesn't show up in that person's Connect tab like favoriting a tweet of theirs would.

Like the @-reply and the retweet, Twitter's Favorite button came to life as users saw fit. Now it may be up to Twitter to lead users toward where it should go next, but figuring that out is no longer much of a risk: the Twitter of 2013 uses tiny micro-experiments to test out its new feature ideas, using user feedback to help it figure out what should stay, what should go, and what should be tweaked. Some of those features could turn into the next retweet, while others may fall from the nest like discarded eggs.