 "Twitter testing account to track viral tweets, may compete with Favstar")
After trying to inform its users about breaking news events and the best accounts to follow, Twitter has kicked off yet another experimental account. With this new account, Twitter is going to attempt predicting what tweets will go viral on the micro-blogging website.
Named @magicstats, the account’s description reads, “I favorite the best tweets I see in real-time”. There isn’t much that one can discover from the account itself, since it is protected and does not approve of followers. Twitter seems to be keeping this account’s activities hush-hush for now.
Getting behind tweets that will go viral
However, The Next Web and TechCrunch both have noticed a trend with MagicStats. The former publication says that a couple of its tweets were favourited by the account and received well over a 100 retweets within a few hours of MagicStats stepping in. TechCrunch too writes that a few of its tweets that were favourited by the account seem to be doing pretty well on both favourites as well as retweets metrics.
The account has, essentially, found a way to trawl through Twitter and find tweets that supposedly have the potential to go viral on the micro-blogging website. It was originally set up to monitoring the MagicRecs experiment by Twitter. The account essentially recommended profiles to follow on Twitter to those who’ve signed up for the service.
TechCrunch reports that before the account was turned into a protected one, a look at its favourites column had showed that MagicStats would never favourite a tweet first. It always followed a lead that helps the account discover a tweet’s potential. It’s widely being believed that Twitter is planning a Favstar competition in-house.
For those not in the know, Favstar is a third-party service that allows you to browse through favourited tweets. It’s a yardstick of popular tweets and you can even “award” a tweet with the title of “Tweet of the Day”. Favstar is a very popular service and also offers premium services for tweets. Twitter has been experimenting with a bunch of hands-on accounts like MagicRecs and EventParrot so we would not be surprised if the micro-blogging website does indeed announce one day that it’s started a service simply to track viral tweets.
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