When was the last time you favorited a tweet?

A few days ago I was listening to @davewiner and @jayrosen_nyu on their Rebooting the News podcast, and dave was talking about his 40tweets app.

40twits takes a look at the stats for the shortened URLs you post to twitter and decides which ones are most popular, then displays them in order. Dave's current top link as about Wikipedia and Michael Jackson.

I don't know if it counts the link being retweeted, but I'm going to guess yes.

This got me thinking about one of the original features of twitter - the favorite. I remember using favorites a lot before I started following 1000+ people. Now I just sort of let the wave go by. Also, not every desktop tool has an easy/visible favorite button.

I put out a call to my twitter group: "when was the last time you favorited a tweet?" and got a big response. (displayed in reverse order)

Thanks @gilcreque, @modulist, @karschp, @thandelike, @ericschechter, @domhay, @staticnrg, @tiburon, @doreeno, @incanus77, and @mrscrumley for replying. Of everyone who participated, it seems like Eric Schechter and myself are the only two people who don't use it very often, or at all.

Looks like I'm not the only person thinking about the utility of Twitter Favorites. This post by Christopher Lynn is about the same subject.

TweetDeck has a view to let you look at your favorites, but I didn't see a place to add a favorite very easily - it's hiding under "other actions", which you see when you hover over the user's icon. Tweetie (desktop) requires a right-click, or you can press the "F" key, then a little star appears next to the tweet.

I currently pipe my blog feed to twitter, and I don't hear a lot of complaints about that. I'm thinking about piping my Delicious bookmarks to twitter as well. Do any of you folks pipe your bookmarks in? Would you like to see more useful links on twitter?