Twitter announced last month that it would start occasionally injecting tweets into users’ timelines if someone the user was following had favorited them. What followed was a weeks-long backlash over the publicization of favoriting behavior.
Thankfully, there’s now a solution. And no, it’s not to make your account private.
It’s a Web service called FavGuard, which connects to your Twitter account and serves as a sort of intermediary between your favoriting decisions and your public persona. Whenever you favorite a tweet, FavGuard stores that favorite and unfavorites the tweet for you. The service promises that “You will always have 0 favorites.”
FavGuard, which scans for new favorites every five minutes, is not a solution for everyone. For example, some people connect their Twitter accounts to services like IFTTT and use the favoriting feature as a DIY read-it-later service. Since FavGuard removes favorites almost immediately, it may not be a viable option for people with custom setups like IFTTT. (The company behind FavGuard says in its FAQ that it is “working on integrating” these kinds of third-party services.)
“The service is free during our beta phase,” FavGuard’s creators write. “When Version 1 is released there will be a nominal yearly fee (serving the noble cause of buying us a cup of coffee and a slice of cheesecake).”
In case you’re wondering, @FavGuard currently has 14 favorites… that we know of.